For many years, corporate treasury strategies were very predictable: cash, bonds, and money market instruments. But the world shifted in 2020 when MicroStrategy made waves by placing Bitcoin squarely on its balance sheet as an offensive strategy. Now, with Bitcoin now firmly established in many corporate reserves, a new paradigm is emerging: companies are embracing proof-of-stake assets, starting with Ethereum, to earn yield while staking. This marks a critical shift in how companies think about treasury management in the digital age.
MicroStrategy led the charge in August 2020 with an initial $250 million BTC purchase, framing Bitcoin as a strategic hedge against inflation and depreciation. By late 2024, MicroStrategy had amassed over 423,650 BTC, now valued at $42 billion, making it the largest corporate BTC holder. Corporate Bitcoin accumulation has spread rapidly: 61 public firms now hold more than 3.2% of total BTC supply with companies such as Tesla, GameStop, Riot Platforms, and Twenty One Capital all including Bitcoin in their treasuries. By mid 2025, private and public entities reportedly held more than 847,000 BTC.
As BTC led the digital treasury charge, Ethereum emerged as a compelling next step, offering staked yield plus utility via smart contracts.
These moves reflect a broader cell-level strategy: shifting from purely speculative assets to productive assets that deliver yield while supporting growing digital ecosystems.
Institutional custodial and infrastructure support has become the bedrock of credible crypto treasury strategies. Major players like Coinbase Custody, Anchorage Digital, Fireblocks, and BitGo now offer enterprise-grade custody and staking services tailored to institutional clients. For example, BitGo provides multisignature cold storage and staking support across numerous networks, managing approximately one‑fifth of on‑chain Bitcoin transactions by value. Anchorage Digital, a federally chartered crypto bank, and Fireblocks, recently approved by New York regulators, are now integrated into services like 21Shares’ spot BTC and ETH ETFs alongside Coinbase, further reinforcing industry-grade security and operational compliance. On top of custody, Validator-as-a-Service (VaaS) providers, including Chorus One, Figment, and Kiln, deliver staking infrastructure with service-level guarantees, compliance tooling, and risk mitigation capabilities to allow corporations to operate node infrastructure or delegate responsibly without needing internal DevOps teams, preserving security while capturing staking yields.
Regulatory clarity is also catching up. The IRS issued Revenue Ruling 2023‑14 on July 31, 2023, confirming that staking rewards are taxed as ordinary income once received by cash-method taxpayers under Section 61(a). Complementing this, the SEC has signaled openness to compliant staking frameworks as custodians partner with spot ETF issuers, reinforcing governance and audit controls. Looking ahead, the proposed Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 (CLARITY Act) would further strengthen this landscape by formally demarcating regulatory jurisdictions: assigning digital commodities such as ETH and SOL to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) while affirming the SEC’s oversight of securities. It would also clarify that mature, protocol-native tokens and DeFi protocols are not investment contracts and further supports institutional use of on‑chain strategies, but also promises to unlock structured layers like restaking, vaults, and LST integrations while preserving board-level governance, audit trails, and operational transparency.
Producing real returns while signaling innovation, staking ETH and SOL offers public companies an attractive alternative to low-yield corporate cash or stablecoin reserves. Profitable yields of 3–7% APY are now accessible through institutional staking platforms, easily outperforming many fixed-income rates. Holding programmable assets also facilitates strategic optionality, enabling treasurers to engage with DeFi use cases, tokenize balances, or even pilot vendor fee settlements with smart contracts.
Beyond financial results, corporate treasury adoption of productive crypto signals clear differentiation to investors. A leading example is SharpLink Gaming, which converted a significant portion of its capital into Ethereum and staked over 95% of it. The firm credits this strategic shift, and the appointment of Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin to its board, for signaling innovation and advancing its market positioning.
Looking Ahead
The evolution of corporate crypto treasuries is unfolding in clearly defined phases, each building upon the last in sophistication and capital efficiency. The first phase, Bitcoin pioneering, emphasized symbolic value and digital gold positioning. This was followed by the productive digital assets phase, where firms began to allocate into Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL), not just for exposure but also for the ability to earn staking rewards, thereby generating yield from idle capital. And now, we are entering the multi-layer yield phase, in which forward-looking treasuries are layering on liquid staking, restaking protocols, and decentralized finance (DeFi) integrations to unlock additional yield and liquidity while retaining principal exposure. As regulatory frameworks solidify and infrastructure scales, expect more corporate treasurers to move from storing value to building yield-generating digital treasury architectures.
Ethereum staking continues to mature, and institutions with significant ETH holdings are increasingly looking for secure and yield-competitive strategies. At Chorus One, we are building solutions that combine simplicity, flexibility, and performance – allowing our clients to participate in Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem without added complexity.
Our latest staking product leverages Lido stVaults to deliver two complementary strategies:
This dual approach positions Chorus One to better meet the diverse needs of institutional clients – whether they value simplicity, capital efficiency, or higher returns.
Several factors make stVaults and stETH a natural fit for our institutional staking product:
Security remains foundational to our approach. We are actively testing vanilla and looped staking strategies on testnets to validate reliability, scalability, and client safety.
If custom smart contract development is required, we will follow strict transparency standards by publishing fully public audits. Institutions can also review our broader security framework in our Chorus One Handbook and security documentation.
By integrating stVaults into our staking product suite, Chorus One is unlocking several benefits for institutions:
The launch of stVault-based staking products marks a significant step forward in Chorus One’s institutional offering. By combining the liquidity of stETH with the flexibility of stVaults, we are empowering institutions to access yield opportunities that are both secure and scalable, without unnecessary dependencies.
At Chorus One, we believe the future of ETH staking lies in making institutional participation seamless, capital-efficient, and reward-optimized. stVaults are a key part of that vision.
At Chorus One, we’ve always believed that staking should be both secure and seamless. Over the past few years, we’ve partnered with leading institutions like Ledger, Utila, and Cactus to bring institutional-grade staking solutions to users worldwide. These partnerships have largely relied on SDK-based integrations, which, while effective, still require a fair amount of development and testing on the client side.
Now, we’re taking simplicity to the next level with the Chorus One Earn Widget.
The Chorus One Earn Widget is a ready-to-integrate staking portal designed to be embedded directly into a partner’s website or app. Built on an iFrame, it allows platforms to offer staking products to their users almost instantly: no heavy lifting, no lengthy development cycles.
With a prebuilt user interface, wallet connection support, and built-in transaction flows, partners can launch staking services quickly, while users can start staking assets and earning rewards without leaving the familiar environment of their preferred app or platform.
For many of our partners, speed matters, and we have seen this accelerate in recent weeks, with some institutions needing to quickly onboard a new provider for staking in days. Take any leading FinTech app, for example, which is preparing to add staking–while SDK integrations provide full customization, FinTech apps and similar partners want a plug-and-play solution that minimizes the technical overhead of launching a new product.
The Chorus One Widget solves this by offering:
In short, the widget makes staking as easy as adding a YouTube video to your site.
The widget is designed for:
By removing development and testing hurdles, the widget opens the door for a wider range of institutions to integrate staking into their products.
The Chorus One Earn Widget comes with a set of functional and non-functional features designed to ensure security, scalability, and usability:
For partners, the widget reduces integration time dramatically while offering a customizable, secure, and scalable solution. It fits neatly into existing workflows and comes with implementation guides and support from the Chorus One team.
For end users, the widget ensures a familiar, intuitive interface to stake assets and track rewards, without navigating away from the apps and platforms they already trust.
The launch of the Chorus One Earn Widget represents a strategic step toward expanding our product suite which includes the Chorus One SDK and dApp, and reaching a broader client base. By lowering the barrier to entry for staking integration, we’re enabling more institutions, both traditional and decentralized, to offer their users access to rewards and participation in proof-of-stake networks.
Our goal is clear: make staking simple for everyone. Whether through SDKs for tailored integrations or the plug-and-play widget for faster rollouts, Chorus One is committed to delivering best-in-class staking infrastructure to meet our partners’ diverse needs.
Institutional crypto treasuries are entering a new phase. In the first wave, treasurers allocated to Bitcoin and Ethereum, focusing on long-term exposure and basic staking yields. But as on-chain infrastructure matures and liquid staking protocols like Lido and EigenLayer gain traction, a new strategy is emerging: yield stacking. By combining liquid staking tokens (LSTs), restaking mechanisms, and DeFi services, treasuries can now layer multiple sources of yield on top of the same principal, without giving up custody, transparency, or compliance controls. Treasuries that can generate 3–5% from vanilla savings and staking, can now see 6–10% using enterprise-grade tools and increasingly permissioned crypto vaults. This is Treasury 3.0: dynamic, composable, and built for capital efficiency.
The blink-and-you- will-miss- it era of single-layer staking, locking ETH or SOL for basic yield, is already giving way to yield stacking strategies that enhance capital efficiency without compromising security. Traditional staking is a great foundation, delivering around 3–5% APY on assets like Ethereum and Solana. Adding liquid staking, using tokens such as stETH or mSOL, which grant liquidity and composability for use across DeFi protocols, add another 3+%. For example, Lido’s stETH, for instance, currently yields 2.7-3.3% APY on secured ETH while enabling seamless DeFi integration across 90+ platforms. Next comes restaking, via platforms like EigenLayer, which allows existing staked (or liquid-staked) ETH to secure additional protocols, adding an extra ~.50% yield while leveraging Ethereum’s security layer. Each layer compounds yield while keeping treasuries in control via custodied wrappers, making this tactical approach highly compelling for sophisticated institutional finance teams.
Imagine a treasury that layers multiple yield strategies on the same ETH base—for example:
Stacking these rewards represents a 2x+ improvement over traditional savings or T-bill yields (~3% APY), without relinquishing principal or legacy custody frameworks. Whether a treasury opts for a conservative single-stack or a progressive full-stack deployment, the efficiency gain is clear, and easily trackable with the right tooling.
What once required bespoke tooling and manual tracking is now becoming enterprise-ready. Institutional-grade infrastructure is rapidly evolving to support yield-stacking strategies through familiar custody, validator, and reporting partners. Custodians like Coinbase Custody, Anchorage Digital, and BitGo now support liquid staking tokens (LSTs) and restaking flows, enabling treasuries to layer yield without compromising asset security. On the validator side, providers such as Chorus One, Kiln, Figment, and Renzo offer restaking and AVS onboarding services with built-in compliance and risk frameworks. And tools like Chorus One’s Rewards Reporting complete the stack by offering audit-ready reporting, wallet-level attribution, and easily exportable formats to satisfy both finance and ops teams. The combination of performance, visibility, and enterprise integration is what transforms this from a crypto-native idea into a finance-grade treasury solution.
While the opportunity is clear, executing a Treasury 3.0 strategy requires thoughtful navigation of regulatory, technical, and organizational complexity. Tax guidance remains underdeveloped, especially around restaking and liquid staking tokens (LSTs). For example, the IRS has clarified that staking rewards are taxed as ordinary income upon receipt (Rev. Rul. 2023‑14), but has yet to issue formal treatment of restaking flows or derivative tokens like stETH and LRTs. Meanwhile, Europe’s DAC8 and proposed U.S. legislation like the CLARITY Act could introduce new disclosure and compliance obligations for multi-layer yield strategies. On the operational front, risks include smart contract vulnerabilities in vaults or restaking modules, as well as composability fragility, where issues in one protocol layer (e.g., an LST depeg) could cascade through a treasury stack. To handle these requirements, institutions must update investment policies, establish clear escalation protocols, and ensure cross-functional coordination between finance, legal, and technical teams. But these are small obligations in comparison to the power of a Treasury 3.0 yield stacking strategy.
The next evolution of treasury management isn’t a future concept, it’s already unfolding across the on-chain economy. Treasury 3.0 strategies harness staking, restaking, and DeFi layers to unlock meaningful, compoundable returns which significantly outperform traditional finance tools while preserving custody, compliance, and control. With infrastructure and reporting tools maturing, these strategies are now auditable and enterprise-ready. For forward-looking finance teams, the question is no longer if to adopt these strategies, but how to operationalize them responsibly. Institutions that act now will not only drive stronger yield, they'll define the governance, compliance, and capital efficiency standards of the new digital economy.
