The corporate crypto playbook, long authored by Michael Saylor, now faces a new chapter. His company, MicroStrategy, holds a massive Bitcoin position that defines institutional crypto strategy. But a new model is emerging — one that applies the same logic to Ethereum.
A new class of publicly traded companies is forming, purpose-built to hold Ethereum’s native asset as their primary treasury reserve. The crypto community has already coined a name for them: “ETH Treasuries.”
Like MicroStrategy before them, these firms aim to leverage their stock as a premium vehicle for buying more crypto. But there’s a crucial difference: they aren’t just buying ETH — they’re using it.
To understand the ETH Treasury wave, it helps to revisit the blueprint.
Michael Saylor, founder and Executive Chairman of MicroStrategy, redefined corporate treasury strategy by going all in on Bitcoin in 2020. His premise was simple: treat BTC as “digital capital” to outpace inflation and compound shareholder value.
As of July 2025, MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin holdings exceeded ₿607,770, worth over $71 billion. “$MSTR has generated a BTC gain of ₿93,191 YTD, worth $11.1 billion,” Saylor revealed. That staggering figure reflects not just price appreciation, but a capital-raising model where MicroStrategy sells overvalued shares to buy more BTC, increasing the per-share exposure to Bitcoin.
Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum is not just a store of value — it’s a programmable settlement layer and a base for decentralized applications.
Its native token, ETH, is productive: it can be staked to secure the network and earn 3–5% annual yield, while also being used as gas for decentralized finance (DeFi) operations. That opens new doors for corporate strategies.
Think MicroStrategy, but with productive, deflationary ETH,” wrote Eric Conner, co-author of EIP-1559 and long-time Ethereum advocate — a model he and others suggest is now being replicated.
Conner isn’t alone in seeing the shift. Nick (@nicrypto), CEO and Co-founder of Coin Bureau, recently wrote on X: “An ETH treasury might actually be safer than Bitcoin: productive asset (generates yield), growing utility, institutional adoption accelerating.”
With the recent launch of spot ETH ETFs in the U.S. and upgrades like Dencun — which cut Layer-2 transaction fees by 90% — ETH is now being viewed through a different institutional lens. According to a Finder, Ethereum could exceed $6,100 in 2025, thanks to these tailwinds.
The emergence of ETH Treasuries is more than a trend — it’s a tectonic shift that will ripple outward, especially for ecosystems built atop Ethereum. Shiba Inu, the meme-coin-turned-metaverse-and-DeFi hub, is one of them.
Here’s how ETH Treasuries could transform Shiba Inu’s long-term trajectory:
Because Shiba Inu’s Shibarium — its Layer-2 blockchain — is built on Ethereum, any efficiency gains made by the base layer directly improve Shibarium’s performance.
This connection is most visible in how Ethereum’s technical roadmap directly benefits Shibarium. As crypto researchers have noted, major upgrades like Dencun, which cut Layer-2 fees by as much as 10-100x, directly enhance the efficiency of dApps built on top.
Future upgrades like Fusaka promise to further this trend, this impacts Shibarium as it means more throughput, faster confirmations, and cheaper fees translate into better user experience for DeFi apps, NFT platforms, and games built on the layer-2 scalability solution of Shiba Inu.
When institutional treasuries buy and stake billions of dollars worth of ETH, they not only increase the security of the network but also inject massive liquidity into its DeFi ecosystem. DCInvestor, a well-known Ethereum advocate and early crypto investor, explained: “The real benefit of the ETH treasury orgs (like SBET, BMNR, etc.) is the flywheel effect: by accumulating so much ETH, they will be highly motivated to use it as onchain collateral, either in staking or in other DeFi operations.”
This broader ETH-driven liquidity engine has tangible downstream effects for projects like Shiba Inu. It means deeper, more stable trading pools for its native tokens, reducing volatility and making the ecosystem more attractive to larger investors.
Perhaps most importantly, as Ethereum solidifies its status as an institutional-grade asset, it elevates every serious project within its orbit. This shift helps Shiba Inu shed its “meme coin” label and reposition itself as part of an institutionally-recognized digital economy.
Still, the transition is not without friction. As Matthew Sigel of VanEck noted on a recent podcast, Ethereum treasury companies are proliferating, but institutions remain leery due to volatility and complexity, distinguishing ETH’s yield potential from Bitcoin’s store-of-value role.
For Shiba Inu, the move from meme to meaningful is already underway — but the rise of ETH treasuries could accelerate that transformation by embedding its ecosystem deeper into the capital flows of major institutions.
What Saylor did for Bitcoin, these new firms are doing for Ethereum — but with a twist.
They’re not just holding ETH. They’re staking it. Lending it. Looping it through DeFi.
They’re showing that you can build a profitable corporate treasury by using Ethereum as productive infrastructure, not just passive gold.
The old question was which crypto will win.
The new one is which monetary philosophy will dominate: Bitcoin’s static store-of-value, or Ethereum’s productive, programmable capital?
That question — now playing out on corporate balance sheets — will shape the future not just of crypto, but of how value itself is defined in the digital economy.
