Written by: 0xResearcher
If market sentiment is the thermometer of emotions, then "treasury allocation" is the voting machine for enterprises. Who puts real money into their balance sheet and bets on which altcoins is often more reliable than the buzz on social media. In 2025, we are seeing more and more publicly listed companies including non-BTC and non-ETH tokens in their treasuries in public disclosures, such as FET and TAO in the AI sector, HYPE and ENA in new DeFi infrastructure, as well as payment veterans like LTC and TRX, and even community-driven tokens like DOGE. Behind these holdings are not only business synergies and the pursuit of asset diversification, but also a "weather vane" for ordinary investors: who is buying, why they are buying, and how they use the tokens after buying. Starting from these questions, you will find it easier to distinguish between strong and weak narratives, and understand which altcoins are being taken seriously by "institutional capital."
Why Look at Treasury Allocations?
Use "real corporate money" to identify strong narratives. First, because it is harder to fake. Once a company includes tokens in its financial statements or regulatory filings, management must explain the size of the holdings, accounting policies, custody, and risk, which is much more binding than just "sloganeering." Second, because it is closer to "holding for use." In this treasury wave, many companies are not just buying tokens, but also signing technical cooperation agreements, introducing tokens as product utilities, or using them for on-chain staking yields. Typical examples include Interactive Strength planning to purchase about $55 million FET and signing a cooperation agreement with fetch.ai, Freight Technologies binding FET to logistics optimization scenarios, Hyperion DeFi using HYPE for staking and integrating with Kinetiq to connect yield and collateral paths, and TLGY (to be merged with StablecoinX) planning to establish an ENA treasury to bet on Ethena's synthetic stable and yield structure. The commonality of these actions is: tokens are not just prices, but also "credentials" and "fuel." Third, it provides another path for ordinary investors. You can directly study tokens, or you can gain "indirect exposure" by researching listed companies holding these tokens. Of course, this is a double-edged sword: small-cap companies combined with highly volatile tokens often make stock prices act as "token proxies," resulting in more dramatic ups and downs. If you take the "stock indirect exposure" route, position control and timing become especially important.
From the 2025 market background, this trend is accelerating. At the macro level, the launch of US spot crypto ETFs has increased risk appetite, and the strength of BTC and ETH has provided an "overflow window" from points to the broader market, drawing more attention to quality sectors. On the company side, attitudes are also changing: from "tentative holdings" a few years ago to "strategic allocations," and even the emergence of new species whose main business is "crypto treasury management"—some companies are proactively transforming and clearly making the construction and operation of crypto treasuries their main business line. In terms of disclosure, companies are no longer satisfied with press releases, but are increasingly disclosing holding sizes, fair value, custody details, and risk control arrangements through regulatory filings, quarterly reports, and investor presentations, enhancing the verifiability of information. In short, the heat is back, the path is clearer, and the capital is getting more "serious." This also means that observing treasury dynamics is becoming a reliable window for understanding industry direction.
Recent statistics of listed companies' treasury holdings in altcoins
Three Major Altcoin Themes: AI, New DeFi, and Veteran Payment Coins
AI sector (FET, TAO): The key signal of this theme is "holding for use." Tokens of AI-native networks are often not just speculative targets, but "tickets and fuel" for access and settlement: invoking intelligent agents, accessing computing power and model markets, and network incentive mechanisms all require endogenous token usage. The entry of corporate treasuries is often accompanied by technical cooperation and business integration, forming closed loops in logistics optimization, computing power invocation, or intelligent agent deployment, so the speculative weight is relatively low and more inclined toward strategic allocation. However, this sector also has uncertainties: the combination of AI and blockchain is still in the validation stage, valuations may reflect future expectations in advance, and the long-term sustainability of tokenomics (inflation/deflation mechanisms, incentive models, fee recovery) still needs observation.
New DeFi infrastructure (HYPE, ENA): This sector takes a "efficiency + yield" combo approach. HYPE represents performance-oriented DeFi infrastructure: by supporting derivatives trading and staking derivatives on high-performance chains, it forms a "yield earning + liquid staking and re-collateralization" capital cycle, providing efficient utilization paths for institutions and liquidity pools. The interest point for corporate treasuries is that it not only brings on-chain governance and yields, but also enhances liquidity and market stickiness through capital cycling.
ENA's appeal is more focused on synthetic stability and hedged yield design. Ethena attempts to create a "dollar-like" stable asset and endogenous yield source by combining staking derivatives and hedging strategies, without relying on the traditional banking system. If this model can be integrated with exchanges, custodians, and payment ends, it could form a truly closed-loop "crypto dollar + yield" system. For corporate treasuries, this means holding a stable unit of account while also gaining yield and tools to hedge volatility. However, its risks are more complex: liquidation safety, robustness of smart contracts, and stability under extreme market conditions are all key points requiring high-intensity audits and risk control.
Source: X
Payment and veteran large caps (LTC, TRX, DOGE): By comparison, this group of assets is more like a "worry-free base position and payment channel." They have a longer history, stronger liquidity, and more mature infrastructure, making them suitable as "cash-like" allocations in corporate treasuries, meeting both long-term value storage and payment scenarios. LTC and TRX have efficiency advantages at the payment and settlement layer, making them directly usable payment exposures for treasuries; DOGE, with its community and brand spillover effect, has unique value in lightweight payments and topic propagation. Overall, these assets play a more stable and foundational role, but have limited new growth stories and may face increasing competition from stablecoins and L2 payment networks in the future.
Knowing What to Buy Is Not Enough—You Must Know How to Analyze
See the trend clearly, but don't make simple analogies. When companies write a certain token into their financial reports, it's like voting with real money, which helps us filter out a lot of noise, but it is not a panacea. A more comprehensive observation framework is to look at three levels simultaneously: is there business synergy (does the company actually use the token), is there formal disclosure (is it written into regulatory filings, specifying how much was bought, how it is stored, and what risks exist), and do on-chain data keep up (activity, trading depth, and liquidation stability). The real value of corporate treasury allocation is not to provide investment advice, but to reveal the underlying logic of industry evolution—when traditional listed companies begin to allocate specific tokens on a large scale, it reflects a structural shift in the entire crypto ecosystem from "pure speculation" to "value anchoring."
From a macro perspective, this wave of treasury allocation marks the convergence of three important trends: the maturation of the regulatory environment—companies dare to disclose crypto asset holdings in public documents, indicating that compliance frameworks are being established; the concretization of application scenarios—no longer the abstract "blockchain revolution," but quantifiable business needs such as AI training, DeFi yields, and cross-border payments; and the institutionalization of capital structure—from retail dominance to corporate participation, meaning longer holding periods and more rational pricing mechanisms. More profoundly, treasury allocation is redefining the essence of "digital assets." In the past, we were used to viewing cryptocurrencies as high-risk speculative tools, but as more and more companies use them as operating assets or strategic reserves, they begin to acquire attributes similar to foreign exchange reserves, commodity inventories, or technology licenses. This cognitive shift may be more disruptive than any technological breakthrough.
