A lot of companies will be following in the footsteps of Michael Saylor’s Strategy when it comes to Bitcoin. This in turn will have an unintended outcome where firms will have to diversify and take on “more risks” to compete.
Think about how many TradeFi firms and conventional companies are slowly converting to operating as a direct bitcoin treasury or one by proxy.
As this number grows, the concept of a BTC treasury will no longer be an interesting bet for investors, so that would lead to expanding these treasuries to accommodate more digital assets besides the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
Generally, by following the Strategy playbook, I would expect that this will go bad for many firms but the extreme events are not our concern, everyone should know to manage risks when it comes to investments, so what's to really look at is what is really being birthed and set to literally earn wide adoption across TradFi firms.
But before we go into that, what Brazil Fintech is buying Bitcoin?
Méliuz’s executive chairman says his fintech firm has become Brazil’s first publicly-traded Bitcoin treasury company following shareholder approval, with the firm also announcing it bought $28.4 million worth of Bitcoin to add to its existing stack.
“Historic day! Our shareholders have approved, by a wide majority, the transformation of Méliuz into the first Bitcoin Treasury Company listed in Brazil,” Israel Salmen posted to X on May 15.
Salmen said the firm snapped up 274.52 Bitcoin for an average purchase price of $103,604, achieving a BTC yield of 600%.
Méliuz now holds 320.3 Bitcoin, worth a little over $33 million, with the latest purchase adding to the Brazilian fintech firm’s first purchase of 45.73 Bitcoin on March 6. — Cointelegraph report
Méliuz is not a familiar name, but from what I can find on the web, its services include discount coupons and cashback programs that serve over 30 million people.
The Fintech company's strategic Bitcoin purchase move was initially intended to put just 10% of its cash reserves into BTC but things have changed recently.
In a May 15 statement, Méliuz said it would accumulate Bitcoin in an “accretive way” for shareholders using a range of financial instruments.
“Rather than just allocating part of its cash to Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation or currency devaluation, the Company has repositioned its purpose to act by maximizing the amount of Bitcoin per share.”
BTC yield: 600%
Méliuz is evidently on the move to replicate everything Strategy has been doing. This generally means issuing financial instruments that allows the company access capital for bitcoin purchases, just as done with Strategy.
What's even more telling of the situation here is the use of the term “BTC yield” which is like the word “web3” but for traditional institutions in 2025.
Half the time you'd think you know what these guys mean by “BTC yield” but you really don't because it's deceptive and not actually yield. Unfortunately, deception runs deep in traditional finance and their target market happens to fall for it every single time, so it works.
Reading the 600% makes me think about the initial hype stages of DeFi where thousands of tokens popped up to offer insane APRs on LPs or token staking contracts.
This time though, this is happening with traditional institutions but you can expect the results to be the same, eventually.
Certainly, this is good for the markets, the ecosystem can always appreciate every channel of exposure, this has largely always been my conclusion to most TradeFi related developments when it comes to crypto.
So, today it's Méliuz, soon every company will be issuing debt instruments to build strategic crypto reserves and this includes companies that are practically dead in some sense. I mean, most considered Strategy (then Microstrategy) to be a dead company before Saylor went all in on Bitcoin.
The BTC yield marketing ploy has been set in motion, now watch it get used in every TradeFi ad without context to lure investors in.