Crypto Treasury Firms Poised to Become Next Berkshire Hathaway-Scale Giants, Analysts Predict

Forget traditional finance—the real wealth-building action is shifting to crypto treasury management.

The New Power Players

Specialized firms managing cryptocurrency assets for corporations are positioning themselves to achieve Berkshire Hathaway-level dominance. These companies aren't just holding digital assets—they're building sophisticated treasury operations that could redefine corporate finance.

Strategic Advantage

Unlike traditional investment firms bogged down by legacy systems, crypto treasury operations leverage blockchain's transparency and programmability. They execute complex strategies—staking, yield farming, decentralized finance protocols—that traditional finance can't replicate without jumping through regulatory hoops.

Market Transformation

The evolution mirrors early days of hedge funds or private equity, but accelerated. These firms operate where Wall Street meets blockchain, creating entirely new financial architectures while traditional banks still debate whether crypto belongs on balance sheets.

Of course, watching crypto firms potentially outpace traditional finance giants does make you wonder what those expensive MBA consultants have been doing all these years besides making PowerPoints.

Beyond speculation

Watkins said most attention has fixated on near-term trading dynamics — premiums to net asset value, fundraising announcements and “what’s the next token”—which misses the larger arc.

“We imagine select DATs becoming for-profit, publicly traded counterparts to crypto foundations, but with broader mandates to deploy capital, operate businesses, and participate in governance,” he wrote.

Because some DATs already control meaningful slices of token supply, their treasuries can be more than vaults; they can be policy and product levers inside ecosystems.

He pointed to crypto-native examples where scale matters: on Solana, RPC providers and proprietary market makers that stake more SOL can improve transaction landing and spread capture; on Hyperliquid, front ends that stake more HYPE can lower user fees or increase take rates without raising costs.

Access to large, permanent pools of native assets can help such businesses bootstrap and scale, he said.

Programmable money, productive balance sheets

Watkins contrasted these plays with MicroStrategy’s bitcoin-only strategy, which is largely about capital structure around a non-programmable asset.

He went on to say that by comparison, tokens on smart contract platforms — ETH, SOL, HYPE — are programmable and can be put to work on-chain.

DATs holding them can stake for fees, supply liquidity, lend, participate in governance and acquire “ecosystem primitives” such as validators, RPC nodes or indexers, turning treasuries into yield-generating balance sheets.

Structurally, he likened winning DATs to a hybrid of familiar models: the permanent capital of closed-end funds and REITs, the balance-sheet orientation of banks, and the compounding ethos of Berkshire Hathaway.

What makes them distinct, he said, is that returns accrue in crypto per share rather than via management fees, making the vehicles closer to pure plays on underlying networks than to traditional asset managers.

He argued that tools like common equity, convertibles and preferreds give DATs flexible funding to expand balance sheets, while on-chain yields can help manage that funding over time.

Winners—and risks

Watkins cautioned that “not all DATs will make it.”

He expects many first-generation vehicles—those heavy on financial engineering and light on operating substance — to fade as conditions normalize. As competition intensifies, he anticipates consolidation, experiments with more exotic financing and, at times, reckless balance-sheet moves if premiums flip to discounts and pressure builds.

In his view, the survivors will be those that pair disciplined capital allocation with operating chops, recycling cash flows into token accumulation, product building and ecosystem expansion. “Over time, the best managed ones could evolve into the Berkshire Hathaways of their blockchains,” he wrote.