Public companies are now building entire businesses around accumulating digital assets, creating a completely new category of company known as Digital Asset Treasuries (DATs). These are firms that explicitly pursue a strategy of accumulating digital assets as the core function of their business. Following the model pioneered by Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy in 2020, hundreds of new firms have since adopted the playbook, cementing DATs as a central narrative in both equity and crypto markets.
Ethereum treasuries, now holding almost $15 billion in ETH across key global public companies and protocols, are moving beyond a simple store-of-value thesis. They are becoming active, yield-generating businesses, fueled by a powerful, symbiotic relationship with Ethereum’s rollup ecosystem. The most sophisticated treasuries are now becoming active capital allocators, seeking to generate yield and shape the very markets they operate in.
However, the strategy is more nuanced than simply deploying assets for yield. It involves an important choice: should a treasury partner exclusively with an existing rollup’s onchain ecosystem, or should it focus on accessing the best risk-adjusted yields across a fragmented, multi-chain landscape?
This post explains the new treasury playbook, how DATs are bootstrapping entire ecosystems, and how Caldera provides the critical infrastructure for accessing onchain capital markets.
Any Asset Can Be Productive Onchain
The core of the new treasury playbook is productivity. Any digital asset, from ETH and wrapped BTC to RWAs and even memecoins, can be deployed in DeFi to generate yield. Traditional DATs engage almost entirely in PIPE financing, where they issue new shares in exchange for capital to buy more assets for their balance sheet. As long as the percentage dilution of shares remains less than the percentage increase of assets on the balance sheet in each subsequent PIPE deal, the assets held per share increases in perpetuity. However, this is very difficult to maintain at scale as you require an ever increasing number of shareholders to counterbalance the new float. It is simply unsustainable. Decentralized Finance flips this model on its head allowing DATs to grow their treasury through non-dilutive returns.
The yields can be significant. Leading DeFi protocols like Ether.fi currently offer yields exceeding 6% APY on ETH deposits, AAVE typically offers 4% on wrapped ETH lending, and more exotic strategies on lesser known protocols can amplify returns further. The challenge is not if yield is available, but where to find the best risk-adjusted return and how to access it efficiently. This requires a strategic approach to navigating the world of chains, whether by concentrating on a single ecosystem, or accessing opportunities across many.
How a Treasury Can Ignite an Ecosystem
One of the most powerful strategies for a DAT is to partner with an existing rollup and use its substantial TVL to bootstrap an entire ecosystem of new DeFi protocols from scratch. This creates a powerful flywheel, as seen in the partnership between SharpLink and Linea. Here’s how it works:
DAT Injects Massive TVL: The treasury brings a large, committed, and ever increasing pool of capital to a nascent onchain ecosystem.
Liquidity Lowers Borrowing Rates: This surplus of liquidity on the new chain lowers borrowing rates compared to more established rollups, where capital is more utilized.
Low Rates Attract Users: Yield farmers and large traders are incentivized to bridge over to take advantage of cheaper borrowing rates and new opportunities.
Activity Generates Revenue: This influx of users drives transaction volume, generating fee revenue for the rollup and the protocols built on it.
The DAT Benefits Directly: As a foundational partner, the DAT often receives preferential treatment, including ecosystem tokens, and incentives from the new protocols it helped bootstrap.
This playbook transforms the DAT from a passive participant into an ecosystem kingmaker, creating a vibrant new capital market where it holds a privileged position.
Access Fragmented Yield with The Metalayer
The reality of DeFi is that the best yields are often fragmented across dozens of different blockchains. For a treasury focused purely on maximizing its risk-adjusted return, partnering with a single chain as an exclusive relationship may be limiting. An alternative strategy is to access many markets from a single, secure hub. This is where The Metalayer, Caldera’s intent-based interoperability protocol, becomes an integral tool. The Metalayer allows a treasury to:
Establish a Home Base: A DAT can choose a specialized rollup from the Caldera ecosystem as its primary hub. For example, it could use Kinto for its KYC-gated compliance for access to RWA markets or Manta Pacific to tap into deep onchain liquidity. Additionally, it could launch on Ethereum Mainnet or one of the large general L2s – like Arbitrum or Base.
Deploy Capital Across Chains: From its home base, the treasury can use The Metalayer to seamlessly move capital to any other connected blockchain to capture fleeting yield opportunities. If a new protocol on Manta Pacific offers superior returns for a week, the treasury can deploy capital there instantly. While today this means near-instant bridging, the future vision is to support even more time-sensitive strategies, such as using flash loans to execute complex cross-chain arbitrage. The Metalayer aims to eventually put the entirety of Web3 at a DAT’s fingertips.
Access an Ever-Expanding Market: The Metalayer is constantly growing through new integrations. With recent partnerships with major ecosystems like BNB Chain and Base, yield opportunities on those networks’ robust ecosystems become instantly accessible. As more chains are added, treasuries will eventually have access to the entirety of onchain capital markets at their finger tips.
Unify Capital Markets: The Metalayer transforms a collection of siloed chains into a single, interconnected capital market. It allows a treasury to think like a global macro fund, moving assets to wherever they can be most productive, all orchestrated through a simple, intent-based bridging protocol.
Building the Future of Onchain Capital Markets
The relationship between Digital Asset Treasuries and rollups is evolving beyond simple symbiosis. As more real-world assets like real estate and private credit become tokenized, we are moving toward a future where any asset can be used as onchain collateral to generate yield. This shift will expand the scope of DATs significantly, creating nearly endless opportunities for capital allocation. The winning treasuries might not be those confined to a single ecosystem, but those that can dynamically allocate capital across a universe of chains. To do so, the underlying infrastructure they use must be flexible, secure, and above all, interoperable.
Caldera provides this foundational layer. As more institutions deploy their corporate treasuries onchain to access DeFi yields, our platform offers the tools to move beyond passive holding and become active architects of the future of finance. To explore how your treasury can access the interconnected Internet of Chains, connect with our team and learn what’s possible with Caldera.
About Caldera
Caldera is powering the next internet. Its architecture consists of two core components: the Rollup Engine and the Metalayer. The Rollup Engine is a modular operating system used to launch high-performance, custom chains on leading chains and frameworks like Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and ZKsync. The Metalayer then automatically connects every chain into one network. Through this interoperability protocol, all chains access shared liquidity and secure, intent-based bridging that transforms fragmented networks into a unified Internet of Chains. And now with the launch of the Caldera Bridge Preview this expands the product suite and market size that Caldera is tackling.
