🎉 #Gate Alpha 3rd Points Carnival & ES Launchpool# Joint Promotion Task is Now Live!
Total Prize Pool: 1,250 $ES
This campaign aims to promote the Eclipse ($ES) Launchpool and Alpha Phase 11: $ES Special Event.
📄 For details, please refer to:
Launchpool Announcement: https://www.gate.com/zh/announcements/article/46134
Alpha Phase 11 Announcement: https://www.gate.com/zh/announcements/article/46137
🧩 [Task Details]
Create content around the Launchpool and Alpha Phase 11 campaign and include a screenshot of your participation.
📸 [How to Participate]
1️⃣ Post with the hashtag #Gate Alpha 3rd
New Trends in Coin Hoarding for Listed Companies: PoS Tokens, High Returns, and Ecological Layouts
Analysis of the Binary Relationship Between Listed Companies and Crypto Assets
Introduction
The election of Trump as President of the United States in 2024 is a landmark event for the global Crypto Assets industry. This is followed by a series of favorable policies such as Bitcoin becoming a national reserve, stablecoin legislation, and Circle becoming the first stock for stablecoins. The Crypto Assets industry is gradually moving towards compliance and embracing regulation.
At the same time, many publicly listed companies are beginning to emulate the success model of Strategy as BTC coin hoarders. There are tens of thousands of publicly listed companies globally, and the market value of many has severely shrunk, with liquidity being extremely scarce. By acting as coin hoarders, many shell companies can obtain new financing to replenish their liquidity. As a result, some companies unrelated to Crypto Assets or finance have also joined the ranks of coin hoarders, such as the American luxury car modifier ECD, which raised $500 million through equity financing to become one of the Bitcoin coin hoarders.
However, recently, listed companies have a wider range of choices for holding coins, and many cryptocurrencies in the top 100 Crypto Assets have been listed as options for listed companies. In fact, many project tokens are not suitable for long-term holding. Moreover, many tokens are relatively centralized, with the founding team having considerable decision-making power, making it difficult for coin holders to play a larger role. This article will discuss in detail the binary relationship between coin holders and Crypto Assets, as well as thoughts on the topic of decentralization.
1. A Listed Company's Perspective on Crypto Assets
There is no doubt that the primary demand for publicly listed companies choosing to finance the purchase of Crypto Assets lies in market capitalization management. According to statistical data, the number of publicly listed companies holding BTC has reached 34. At the same time, several companies' management teams are proactively transforming the company into a hoarder of Crypto Assets such as ETH, SOL, and HYPE by 2025, in order to emulate the successful path of Strategy. In fact, this strategy has indeed brought significant growth to the stock prices of publicly listed companies.
A certain company previously focused on sports betting, and in May 2025, it announced the completion of approximately $425 million in private financing, planning to heavily purchase ETH as its main treasury reserve asset. The company's stock price rose from $2.97 to $124 within 10 days, an increase of more than an astounding 40 times. The blockchain early project investment company changed its name to SOL Strategies in September 2024, indicating that the company is a Solana version of Strategy. The company's stock price increased from $0.08 to $4.24 within 3 months, more than a 50-fold increase.
A large number of publicly listed companies will transform into coin hoarders as a panacea to boost stock prices, with purchased Crypto Assets expanding from BTC to SOL, HYPE, and BNB. In fact, many companies' purchases of coins are a form of herd behavior, and the management does not sufficiently understand Crypto Assets, lacking long-term strategic planning for coin purchases. This chapter will take the perspective of publicly listed companies and select suitable Crypto Assets for purchase based on their different needs.
1.1 Covering financing costs PoS public chain tokens > PoW public chain tokens
The initial public awareness regarding events such as listed companies holding coins emerged from a company in 2020 that purchased over 20,000 BTC in one go. The company's CEO claimed that they would only buy BTC in the future and would never sell BTC. Coinciding with the BTC bull market from 2020 to 2021, the company's visibility continued to rise, and the purchase of Crypto Assets became a classic case of how a listed company could turn its fortunes around in the capital market.
Bitcoin is a representative public chain of PoW (Proof of Work), where its mechanism relies on the computing power of CPUs, GPUs, ASICs, etc., to continuously perform hash collisions in mining pools, ultimately completing the block generation of the blockchain to earn BTC rewards. Before a certain company purchased BTC, Bitcoin mining companies such as Marathon, Riot, Cleanspark, etc., primarily engaged in mining BTC with their mining machines, thus these companies have a portion of unsold Crypto Assets on their balance sheets.
For publicly listed companies, the issues with PoW public chain assets like BTC are similar to those with gold; once acquired, they can only serve as strategic reserves and are difficult to generate "money from money" through other means. PoS public chains, on the other hand, assign more weight to the tokens themselves. The approval of PoS public chain transactions requires nodes to produce blocks, and becoming a node necessitates staking a certain amount of governance tokens. The staking amount for Ethereum network nodes is a fixed 32 ETH, while Solana network nodes have no staking amount limit. Holders of governance tokens can share a certain percentage of transaction Gas fees as rewards (the profit-sharing mechanisms differ among various public chains).
For publicly listed companies that rely on debt financing, holding governance tokens of PoS public chains and staking those tokens can yield an annualized return of 2% to 7%. This portion of income may cover the company's debt financing costs. Even if the company's performance declines, companies holding PoS public chain tokens need not worry about interest repayment.
1.2 How do listed companies choose PoS public chain Crypto Assets?
Compared to a certain company's "Buy and Hold" strategy for BTC, publicly listed companies screening and purchasing governance tokens of PoS public chains is a more complex and systematic project. Some publicly listed companies may prefer to buy Crypto Assets with greater price volatility; some may prefer to purchase Crypto Assets with a higher degree of decentralization; and there are also some publicly listed companies that are unable to build their own nodes, hence they need to purchase Crypto Assets that have mature liquid staking platforms.
The staking yield can be compared to the dividend yield of stocks. Based on the needs of listed companies, the demand for becoming a PoS token hoarder can be divided into three categories: (1) obtaining high staking yields to cover financing costs while having positive cash flow; (2) achieving high asset appreciation to drive stock price growth; (3) occupying a core position in the ecosystem and strategically laying out around the public chain ecosystem. The following text will filter suitable targets based on the different goals of listed companies.
1.2.1 Pursuing High Staking Returns: SOL staking yield is high, and the public chain transaction volume is stable.
For publicly listed companies where the cost of issuing additional stocks or bonds is high, high-yielding Crypto Assets have strong appeal. According to data, the 7-day annualized returns of public chains such as Polkadot, Cosmos, and Celestia have all exceeded 10%. However, these Crypto Assets have very weak price preservation ability due to their high inflation rates. The aforementioned three types of Crypto Assets have dropped 42%, 36%, and 71% respectively in the past year. Staking yields cannot cover the decline in coin prices. This is not the optimal choice for publicly listed companies.
In contrast, SOL has maintained an upward trend in token price over the past two years while having a relatively high staking yield, with a maximum price drawdown of 52% in the last two years, indicating strong stability. In Solana's staking yield model, the node staking yield = (blockchain rewards + MEV income + Tips income) / total staking amount.
At both ends of the formula's numerator and denominator, the blockchain rewards in the numerator account for the highest proportion, and the amount of blockchain rewards is related to the trading volume of the public chain. The trading volume of the Solana public chain has maintained rapid growth over the past 5 years, with Solana's monthly trading volume in June reaching 2.97 billion transactions. At the denominator end, the current staking rate of SOL has reached over 65%, so there will not be a situation where a large amount of SOL joins the staking nodes, causing a decrease in yield. Overall, the staking rewards of 7% for Solana network nodes are relatively stable.
From the perspective of listed companies, the relatively difficult step in the business model of becoming SOL coin hoarders through targeted issuance or bond financing and obtaining positive cash flow through node staking is building their own nodes. The Solana network nodes require high-performance servers as hardware support, with the minimum configuration being a 64-core processor, 256G RAM, and 1T hard drive. In addition, becoming a network node also requires high-speed network bandwidth support. On the software side, to become a Solana node, one needs to download Git, Rust, Docker, and configuring the node requires certain coding knowledge.
It can be seen that if a listed company wants to build its own Solana network node, it requires a high technical threshold. If the company determines that the process of building its own node is relatively complex, the listed company can choose between a liquid staking platform or RPC node service.
A certain platform is currently one of the main liquidity staking platforms on the Solana network, with a relatively simple staking operation; by connecting a wallet and entering the corresponding amount, one can obtain an annualized return of 7.19% (as of July 3, 2025). However, using a staking platform will somewhat reduce the returns, as the platform does not display the direct commission rate. Specialized staking platforms can obtain higher Tips and MEV floating returns through staking, while stakers receive a fixed annualized return.
For companies that wish to achieve excess returns through Tips and MEV while wanting to lower the threshold for node setup and fixed capital investment, they can choose the RPC node services of certain node service providers. Users lease the bare metal servers from the service providers, which ensure minimum latency (<50ms) and high throughput, meeting the high performance requirements of Solana validators. Unlike some staking platforms where user returns are fixed and platform profits fluctuate; certain service providers charge users fixed fees (different packages have different costs), and floating returns such as MEV and Tips completely belong to the users.
In summary, each of the three options has its pros and cons. Staking platforms are suitable for lightweight coin holders with lower investment, RPC node outsourcing services are suitable for medium-sized coin holders with a certain investment, while building your own node is suitable for coin holders with relatively strong capital and certain technical construction capabilities. Additionally, being a coin holder of SOL also carries certain risks, as the Solana network is relatively centralized and has previously experienced multiple mainnet outages, which can have a certain impact on token prices.
1.2.2 Pursuing Value Growth: HYPE trading fee buyback mechanism, coin price has achieved 10 times growth
For publicly listed companies facing liquidity shortages, the primary short-term demand remains to enhance stock market value, maintaining normal operations of the company through methods such as stock reduction. As coin hoarders, publicly listed companies commonly increase stock prices by purchasing high-growth or highly valued assets. HYPE is the mainstream Crypto Asset for market value growth in the first half of 2025. If publicly listed companies become HYPE coin hoarders, their stock prices will be linked to HYPE token prices, potentially achieving rapid growth in company market value in the short term.
Compared to public chains like SUI, TRON, and XRP, which have also seen significant market capitalization growth over the past year, HYPE's advantage lies in its refined token supply and demand management, ensuring the scarcity of HYPE tokens. In the past six months, related funds have cumulatively repurchased $910 million worth of HYPE by reinvesting approximately 97% of the Gas fee revenue into HYPE buybacks. Currently, only 34% of the total supply is in circulation, with the team holding 23.8% of the tokens locked until 2027-2028, while nearly 39% of the tokens are designated for community rewards, which will be gradually distributed. Since the project has not accepted venture capital, there is no external selling pressure, enhancing HYPE's long-term value potential.
The operating nodes of Hyperliquid are more centralized compared to Solana, with only 21 nodes existing in the entire network, which maintains the high-efficiency operation of the public chain to a certain extent. Therefore, even if listed companies purchase a large amount of HYPE, it is difficult to become one of the 21 core nodes. The official staking platform of the public chain will become an option for coin hoarders to obtain additional income through staking. This platform has attracted over 10 million HYPE for staking. Compared to other public chains, the staking yield of HYPE is relatively low, with data showing a yield of only 2.28%.
1.2.3 Pursuing ecological layout: ETH has a high degree of decentralization, and the development difficulty of Layer2 is low
In the field of Crypto Assets, public chain redundancy is a prominent phenomenon. According to statistics, the total number of public chains on the entire network has exceeded 200.