Battle-Tested Strategies of Holding Bitcoin on the Balance Sheet | Bitcoin 2026

Hi everyone, I'm Julia Duzon. I am the COO of River. River is a US-based Bitcoin only exchange. We also offer Bitcoin banking to individuals and businesses. Today's panel is really going to answer a simple question, which is should a normal operating business hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet? Not speculate, not trade it, but hold it as a long-term strategic asset. And so the folks you're going to hear from today, we are not Bitcoin treasury companies like Strategy. Instead, we are just operating businesses and operators who also maintain Bitcoin and use it strategically in our businesses. So before we jump into intros, I just want to get a sense of who is in the room. And so can I see a show of hands if you run or work at a business? All right, most folks. All right. Do you run or work at a business that holds Bitcoin on its balance sheet today? H wow, easy crowd. Great. Uh, do you work at a business that's maybe considering it? All right, so we have a few folks on the fence. Last one. Any skeptics in the room? Anyone who thinks it's just frankly too risky for a business to have Bitcoin. All right, we have a pretty easy and friendly crowd, guys. You better convince convince our final few. All right, with that I'm going to hand it over to the panelists. Can you all give just quick intros? What does the company do? How do you make money? And what's your role? >> All right, I can start. Hello everyone. Uh I'm from Treasure Company. And basically what we did in 2014, we invented the first Bitcoin and crypto hardware wallet in the world. And since then, we've been operating and our mission is self-custody. Our business is pretty simple. We sell hardware wallets and we offer some complimentary software services. And personally I have been working as a CFO of the treasure for close to 10 years. So in Bitcoin it's quite a lot of time and we've been through a lot of ups and downs and that's what we will talk about. >> All right, good morning everyone. So my name is Leon. I work for Fedi. Uh Fedi combines a Bitcoin wallet chat and community spaces and a highly flexible privacy app. And Fedi has been around for a few years. We started in 2022. Uh I work as the head of operations and I cover a lot of the back office functions including treasury management. Uh in terms of how we make money, we charge a transaction fee on the transactions that occur within the app. Uh good morning everybody. My name is D. Lewis. I am the CFO at uh BTC Inc. Uh so parent company of Bitcoin conference, Bitcoin magazine, Bitcoin for corporations and probably have the easiest answer of how we make money. Everyone's sitting here right now. Um so uh yeah, we sell conference tickets, sponsorships, uh we sell advertising on our media platforms and corporate subscriptions through uh Bitcoin for corporations. >> All right. Awesome. And then in one line, how do you use Bitcoin in your business? >> Very simply said, we earn Bitcoin. We hold Bitcoin and we pay with Bitcoin. So it's a full circle. >> All right. So we use Bitcoin in our treasury. Uh we use Bitcoin in our operations paying suppliers and also playing uh employees as well. >> Yep. Similar to what Stefan mentioned that we're fully integrated Bitcoin. If you even walk the floor, you can probably see some signage that uh you can buy a coffee in Bitcoin. You go to our merch store and pay in Bitcoin. So every single product that we offer at BDC Inc. has a payment option in Bitcoin. And on the other side of the counter, we offer the option to pay every vendor. Our contractors, the great people that work with us that support this event, uh, have the option to pay in Bitcoin. So, we we um have a full circular economy. >> All right, great. Let's talk a little bit about holding Bitcoin. Stephan, I'm going to start with you because Treasur's been at this a long time. You guys were holding Bitcoin before Bitcoin Treasury Strategy was even a thing. How did you guys start doing that? and how has kind of the thinking of your strategy evolved over the years? >> So, let me start with the early days because in 2014 we introduced the first hardware wallet. It was called the treasure model one and it was 2014 and the price was very fair. It was one bitcoin per device and we had a special edition. It was called treasure 1 metallic edition and the price was three bitcoins but uh it was $100 back then. And so that was the moment we really started to earn bitcoins and that was the moment we started to have our own like bitcoin treasury and well then it was ups and downs. So maybe let me be specific 2017 maybe there are people in the audience who remember 2017 it was 21,000 all-time high with the bitcoin like a big hype and then it was brutal crash. I remember as if it was yesterday that the bitcoin was minus 84% at some point and for treasure it was uh that the sales and the revenues were down minus 90%. It was it was brutal and thanks god our founders were kind of well known about the cycles. So they said the strategy hey relax it's okay let's build great stuff in the bare market and let's scale in the bull market. And so I think this was the very basic of our strategy. Uh expect that there are cycles and like work work and that was uh a kind of kind of the basic strategy. And we learned one thing the hard way and let me say it loud. We do not consider Bitcoin treasury to be a financial reserve to be very honest. Uh it's not a working capital. It doesn't work like that. So when the bitcoin is down your reserve is down as well and the revenues are down as well. So for us the bitcoin is more like a venture capital and it worked really well. So for example during the bull runs we used the bitcoin reserve to invest into the company and I think we are one of the few companies in this segment who have been operating more than 10 years with as without a single dollar from investors or the venture capitalists. So we are fully privately owned company. We were able to finance our growth through our own finance and we never asked any investor to venture capital which means 100% freedom and I think this is the way how the Bitcoin treasury can help to build your company. All right, Leon, not everyone in here is in the is the sole decision maker for whether or not their business should have Bitcoin. What was that journey like at Fetty? How did you get your board, your investors, other executives all aligned and just elaborate a little bit on give us was there any drama? How did you even decide how much to put into Bitcoin? >> Right. Really good questions there. Uh so first of all, Fedi is a VCbacked company. Um so when the company first started, all of the founders are Bitcoiners. So philosophical buying was there from the beginning in terms of the founders. Our investors are also bitcoiners. So again philosophical buying was there from day one. So that was uh actually very very easy. Although what I would say is that philosophical buyin is very different from operational readiness in terms of bitcoin. uh getting people to buy Bitcoin is, you know, straightforward, but then what do you do afterwards? How do you manage that? How do you get the discipline needed to weather potentially 80% drops? Um but also discipline when it doubles potentially, right? uh so I think it's important to bear in mind that they're very different uh in terms of how much and how did we decide but what we did very be at the very kind of early stages was to think through we need a policy we don't want to be making this up as we go along I would definitely say that is one of the worst things you want to do we're all humans we have emotions uh in the bull market we feel great in the bare market we feel horrible uh so what we did at the the very beginning was to put together a framework and in this we kind of modeled various scenarios and we discussed it around a round table. So what happens what will we do if the price drops by 60%. What will we do if it doubles? How much cash do we need to have? and we laid out all of these different rules and effectively we did it at the very beginning not in the midst of a drop in the price. Right? So having that discipline I think is absolutely key and making sure that you actually have this framework and one other thing I that I would say is not just having it but you have to remember this is a confidence builder for your board right because they need to see that you are actually thinking about these things and that you're not just kind of making it up as you go along. >> Yeah I think that's really important. We probably should all have frameworks for just our personal investing. As you all know, the highs of Bitcoin, those feel so high, but the lows can also feel really low. So, making sure you don't bring any emotion to those decisions. D BTC Inc. actually uses Bitcoin. And so, for the folks who want to start using it in day-to-day operations, earning their revenue, paying vendors, what does that look like? >> Yeah. So, um there's a lot of tools out there. There's no onesizefitsall in terms of like, okay, let's accept Bitcoin. All right, what does that mean? There's a plethora of tools. Uh there's no pressure to sort of dive head first. Uh there's great partners you can start with. River I know does a great job on uh onboarding, you know, small mediumsiz businesses. So, um you don't have to go at it alone. Um and yeah, it's it's like I said, not not every size fits all for everybody. Uh, one thing I want to kind of mention with Leon in terms of the the framework side I completely agree with and there's that saying right that everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face. If you operate as a Bitcoin business, have a plan to get punched in the face is what what what we've learned is like that you are going to get punched in the face. That's where that volatility is. So know what you're going to do when that happens and that takes all the emotion out of it. And uh so I always tell um my team when they're like what's going on? Are we selling? I was like you don't want your CFO to be a trader. We got the we we have a framework. We have a policy. We know what's going to happen in any scenario and we stick to that policy. Sorry, I I pivot on that because that was the point that I I had too much empathy with Leon when he was mentioning that one. >> Great point. >> Yeah. >> So, a lot of folks here already own Bitcoin, but I think a common question you have is how much? And I'm curious for you all to make it really practical. Say folks run a 5 to10 million a year business in revenue. how much should they be allocating towards buying and holding Bitcoin? >> So maybe to um start with our own uh strategy. So basically in treasure we allocate 30 to 50% into the Bitcoin from the whole financial kind of resources and why is it 30 to 50? Well, it can um be different in the bare market. It's usually after the drop. So it can be 30. But what is great is that we earn bitcoins. So we sell our hardware wallets for bitcoins. So we can do the kind of a DCA as a company because it works the DCA on the personal level but it works on the company level as well. And in the bull runs it can be more than a 50%. Which is sometimes a good signal hey now it's time to sell something or maybe not. And for an average company to the question I think it all starts with one thing and it is is the company uh financially ready and able to build a bitcoin reserve. So if you were a startup with a runway for 12 months, I don't think it makes any sense to kind of start a bitcoin treasury. But let's say in your question it was kind of profitable company 5 to10 million. And I think it's really there is no simple answer and it depends on your specific use case and also it depends on the taxes because uh for example in Europe there are some countries in which if you hold the bitcoin as a person more than one year it's taxfree but it's only for the physical persons. So sometimes it makes sense for the owners of the company to actually pay the dividends and hold the bitcoin on a personal level. So I think it all starts with use case then do your taxes. It's very important and of course uh the use cases. So for example if you want to pay your employees in bitcoin it totally makes sense to allocate two three 5% to the bitcoin you can calculate it and you can just start and see how it's going on. So I think the first step is to really start with that. You don't have to kind of overthink it. You just need to survive the first cycle and test your features and test the use cases for your company and you will see. So maybe 1% is a good start for you. >> Any other thoughts? >> Yeah, I was going to say um similar to the answer about like what to how to get started and accepting Bitcoin. It it it's very dependent on the business like you know your cash reserves, your your how healthy your margins are. But um definitely start conservative that you know be be patient. There's no rush. No one's going to be micro strategy overnight. Um and and and that's how you build the conviction. That's how you get the buy in from your board members, executive team, etc. is um start small and also understand that most people are very reluctant to spend their Bitcoin, right? So you know you may turn on all the levers and say all right we accept Bitcoin and then just crickets. Nobody's showing up to do that. And so what I would also say is don't wait for the world to come to you. One thing we do at BTC, Inc. Yes, we accept Bitcoin out on the floor out there. Um, but it's not going to be the majority. I mean, you guys are in the line. You guys can see most people are still using their credit cards. So, what we do is we convert 10% of all revenue earned through credit card processors to Bitcoin. So, it's like we we accumulate steadily on our own terms as we need to. So there's a lot of different configurations that work for what is right for your business. Um so you you just have to kind of uh be I would just say be patient. It's okay to start small and definitely make sure you have a stable business first. Bitcoin is not a sort of you know miracle fix. If if it's on if if your business has issues, you just can't orange label Bitcoin on it and all your troubles go away. >> Yeah, I completely agree. At River, we actually hold 50% of our treasury in Bitcoin, which I was telling a friend in private equity about that and he almost died thinking that that was an incredibly aggressive strategy. And what as we were talking more, what I then shared is for us that's actually quite conservative because of the strength of the balance sheet. The total balance sheet is $70 million, $35 million held in cash, which is three years of our fixed expenses if our revenue went to zero. And so I would say always there start there as an operating business. You need your treasury to be able to pay your expenses for an extended period of time. Your delta after that is what you can start making investments in and start to allocate to Bitcoin. Custody is also an important topic when it comes to how to be holding Bitcoin as a business. Uh Leon, I'm curious, did you have any early learnings and what would your advice be for folks around how to hold bit how to hold Bitcoin for their business? >> Yeah, absolutely. So what I would say is when we think about custody, we really want to be thinking about low probability, high severity scenarios, right? Effectively, this is a really good way of managing risk. So let me give you one story um of something that happened to us at Fedi once. So um we hold our bitcoin in a multi-ig wallet and we have signers of that wallet geographically dispersed around the world. Uh good practice, right? There was a scenario once where one of the signers uh she was giving birth and at the same time another signer was actually in the Middle East during the recent conflicts uh where obviously missiles were being fired and was also unavailable. So we had two out of the three uh signers who were offline. So what do you do when you need in that one scenario need to move capital um quickly or urgently? Now thankfully both of these signers were able to come back online relatively quickly. But these type of scenarios is are like really good ways of kind of illustrating that you have to think about not just the everyday uh scenarios and always assume that people will be available because this isn't like managing a bank account. This is very very different and some of the challenges are unique to Bitcoin. So when it comes to custody, I would say just definitely think about some of these uh low probability but high severity scenarios. Welcome to predict. The world is a market. Everything is a market. Every headline moves the line. Every moment is your market. Call the moves. Bet on your instinct, your prediction, your edge. Dual bits. Predict where everything is a market. We've talked a lot about the risks. Uh I'm curious, what are some of the benefits to having Bitcoin in your business that are not just about number go up? So uh to give you some particular examples uh it really work well for treasure in multiple ways. So first of all uh we pay our employee in bitcoin or there is an offer to them. So they can for example say I want to be paid 10% or 50% or even 100% in Bitcoin and it works very well because it uh is not only like a brand building in a you know HR thing but it's also kind of a check that these employees because they work for a Bitcoin company. So if they want to be paid in Bitcoin it's you can be sure that these guys are the right people to have in the company. And to be honest, we have people, it's a few of them who are paid 100% in Bitcoin. And it's it's true. It's true. It's interesting. So that's one use case. And I think it's a very good for the brand building. Of course, uh you can pay with Bitcoin on the eShop. You can buy the treasure for the for the bitscoins. So example as as D said example, you want to sell your products in bitcoin. But the third one is the treasure academy. So we support multiple activities around the globe. And this one is particularly focused on Africa. So we really want to help people in the Africa to adopt and orange pill bitcoin and to be able to really start using bitcoin on a daily basis. And well it's not easy to trans to like send money to Africa without any complications. And so treasure academy is a great example. It has been like working for several years and it's great. You can just fund it with bitcoins and it works perfectly. So it can also be kind of a brand building and doing some good stuff for the world. >> Any other benefits you all have seen? >> Yeah, I think just quickly I'll kind of echo uh that last comment which is really around suppliers. So you know at Fedi we are a Bitcoin company and we want to see a world where people use Bitcoin. We want to see circular economies. We want to see people using Bitcoin. So, if that's the world that we're building for, it only makes sense that we actually use Bitcoin to pay our suppliers. And we do that a lot. And what's really interesting, we have a number of suppliers who accepted Bitcoin for the first time ever. They had heard of Bitcoin uh and this is uh in Africa also. Uh they'd heard of Bitcoin. Um they thought, okay, we'll give it a try. Maybe I'll accept 50% of payment in Bitcoin. and now they accept 100% of their payment in Bitcoin. So we have actually, you know, to some extent orange peeled our customers and it helps us to achieve the world that we want to see by actually paying customers in Bitcoin. >> Yeah, I'd say the biggest benefit for a business to use Bitcoin outside the number go up um is the payment network itself. It's 24/7 365. You can't do that with the bank. Um, I'm currently personally renovating our home and I don't know the last time you guys had initiated like a personal wire. Banks are a pain in the ass. Maybe I've been using Bitcoin too often, but it's like this is like I this is so much more difficult and people forget banks you are as a customer downstream of all the rules they have to apply including you know what's this wire for? What's the purpose? Um, BTS Inc. We have been debanked before and fortunately we could still send all our payments out because we had Bitcoin already. All the plumbing was already there. I know that seems like an edge case for people. But one of the things that's great about a 247 365 payment network where I can send a payment for business any vendor across the world don't need their they don't need a bank account. I can send it as quickly as an email and it doesn't have to go through all these intermediary banks with interchange fees and I don't know maybe three to five business days, maybe eight business days. I can see it. I can click a link and I can see the status of this payment and I can see when it confirms there. There's nothing like that. And so for us, especially, you know, running a global conference business, things like that, I can't tell you how many times we've been in scenario where the problem solving ends with a question of, well, can they just accept Bitcoin? And then that solves the the immediate thing because something's held up, a shipment or whatever. So don't underestimate Bitcoin as a payment network. that level of transparency and the the censorship resistant the the nothing can stop that payment from going through. So, um I think that's the biggest unlock for us. >> Yeah, the the bank failing it sounds like an edge case, but we forget quickly this happened in 2023 when SVB failed and that was impacting not just Bitcoin companies but a huge part of the tech and startup ecosystem. suddenly overnight when they went into FDIC receiverhip weren't going to be able to make payroll. And for us, we did we were also at SVB and our backs stop that Alex and I were talking was we're just going to send all of employ our employees Bitcoin if we can't get the payroll out. I'm curious what what companies would you say absolutely should be adding Bitcoin to their balance sheet and then also on the flip side, who shouldn't? Um I think there's um like like there's no limitation for the companies who should or shouldn't own the Bitcoin or put them or the on on the Bitcoin uh treasury or the balance sheet. But again, I think it's mostly about what is your use case or why you do that. So always start with the why, why you want to do that. If it's because of it's trendy or it's because in your CFO club someone mention it, it's not a good idea, still you can investigate it. You can set up some kind of a strategy. You can test with your CEO or on the board and you can then decide. But I think when it really makes sense is the companies who have a very big balance sheet and it's full of financial like fiat currencies because these days the inflation has become a real problem at least in the Europe and I think it really makes sense to look around and there is no kind of too many options what you can do as a company and the bitcoin might be the answer for for this company. So I think it's not about like uh what kind of a business you do or what kind of service you offer. It's mostly about the use case. >> Yeah, I would definitely echo that. I would say it depends on how big uh your cash reserves are. Uh that's definitely one key um consideration. Another is also local um taxation laws. So you need to understand how it works in your country. Um, every country is different and there are some places that are more favorable to holding Bitcoin on the balance sheet than others. So, I would say it would be those two key considerations. >> Yeah, I would just say um it has to solve real business need. You just can't be the the bit the the the nerdy token Bitcoin person that just wants to sort of like uh you know uh shoehorn Bitcoin in the business. You know, just like any major business decision, right? There has to be alignment on what is this actually solving for our business? like why do we need to do that and there needs to be buy in um for that to actually happen. >> I don't know D have you heard about inflation? I feel like that impacts every business. >> This is true. I I I'm not disagreeing but I I'm just saying that people like that needs to come to the surface and the board the decision makers all need to be bought in because if it's just kind of like a novelty maybe will attract like like a marketing gimmick, it it's it won't be longlasting. Yeah. I will give you all one business that I think absolutely has to have Bitcoin. And I know this is a friendly audience. If you run a Bitcoin company in the space, you have to have some sort of allocation to Bitcoin. It can be very small. And I I think of it, it's like if I ran a burger joint, but I was vegan. It just like philosophically does not make any sense. So I think from just like a moral and a cultural standpoint, start if you're a Bitcoin, if you run a Bitcoin company, just start that allocation to Bitcoin. All right. In the next 5 to 10 years to close us out, what do you think happens with adoption amongst businesses for Bitcoin? >> So um I'm always very conservative when it comes to the adoption of the Bitcoin, not only in the you know uh space but also within the institutions. But I think what might change in 5 to 10 years, I think every single serious company will at least have the strategy and there at least will be a discussion on the board level if we want to do that or we don't want to do that. So I think this is what is going to happen. It will be a very serious discussion and as a company you must do the decision and it can be no, it can be yes but you must have discussion definitely. I would say that probably in the next 10 years, not every company will hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet, but I think it will become a lot more commonplace. I think in the same way many companies now hold foreign currencies uh on their balance sheet, they'll also consider holding Bitcoin. Um so I think adoption uh still has a little while to go, but I think we're going to get there, but I don't think every company will be holding it on their balance sheet. Yeah, I would say five five years is relatively soon. I think it'll still be pretty niche. Um, you know, it's kind of a slow ball rolling downhill. By 10 years, you know, 10 years by then, Bitcoin will be around for over 25 years. It'll feel less scary. If you have a thesis around Bitcoin, I think we have a friendly audience that in 10 years and price will be higher than it is today. Let's all hope so. Uh, then CFOs, treasurers, they the the question will the volume will raise of like, okay, why aren't we doing it, right? and maybe they have a compelling reason why not to. But the question if as the price increases, as Bitcoin as a percentage of like total global wealth increases, those are questions they're going to organically surface because it's just going to be more front and center over time. So, I'd say 10 years that question becomes a little bit more uh ubiquitous. I think five years is maybe still too too soon for that to happen to to uh you know on a wide scale. >> We're all low time preference up here. Um but we're also in a room of early adopters. So kudos to all of you and I would just say the one ask since many of you already have gotten your businesses to own Bitcoin, go out and help evangelize it and tell your friends, right? Get them. We can all be innovators together, drive adoption together. Um, and it's actually not that hard to do. Adding Bitcoin to your balance sheet is not a bold decision. If anything, I think it's a very intentional one as an operator. So, thank you. >> Every year, this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year, the stage gets bigger. Sound money center stage. So where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville, July 2027.