Why crypto treasury companies are staking instead of just holding

Crypto treasury companies like Bitmine and SharpLink are staking their token holdings instead of simply holding them. Staking generates real, recurring revenue that can fund day-to-day operations. Meanwhile, the token’s price can still move far enough in a single quarter to erase far more value on paper than the staking revenue can offset. Bitmine’s staking now accounts for the vast majority of its disclosed revenue. SharpLink’s results showed the split in the other direction: it reported steady staking income in the same quarter that a large drop in Ethereum’s price produced a much bigger unrealized loss.

What a “digital asset treasury company” actually is

A digital asset treasury company (often shortened to DAT) is a publicly traded company whose core strategy is holding a large position in one cryptocurrency on its balance sheet. Instead of a bank holding cash reserves or an oil company holding barrels, a DAT holds a crypto token: Bitmine (ticker BMNR) and SharpLink (ticker SBET) do this with Ether (ETH), the native token of the Ethereum network. These companies raise capital (through stock sales, debt, or both) specifically to buy more of the token, and their share price tends to track the size and value of that holding closely.

For a reader who has never followed this space: a DAT is not a crypto exchange, a fund, or a custodian holding assets for other people. It is an ordinary public company, filing ordinary SEC reports, structured like any other public company except that its main asset is a cryptocurrency instead of factories or software.

Why passive holding stopped being enough

Early treasury companies mostly did one thing: buy the token and hold it, betting that price appreciation alone would be the story shareholders cared about. A Galaxy Digital report, covered by the Bitcoin Foundation on April 16, 2026, described the industry’s shift toward putting those holdings to work as a move toward what it called “DAT 2.0.” Treasury firms were expected to “generate business value like any other company,” rather than just sit on a balance-sheet bet. The underlying change is straightforward. A treasury that only holds a token has no revenue of its own. Its income statement is thin, its ability to fund operations depends on selling shares or the token itself, and its reported results swing entirely with the market.

Unlike Bitcoin, whose proof-of-work protocol has no staking, Ethereum has staking built into the protocol itself. Staking means locking the tokens up to help secure the network and earn rewards for doing so. Those rewards are paid by the protocol itself, rather than by trading activity. For a company already holding millions of ETH, staking that ETH instead of leaving it idle turns a static position into an operating revenue stream. That is the move now underway at both Bitmine and SharpLink. It is also why treasury companies are increasingly judged not just on how much of a token they hold, but on how much of it is actually staked.

Bitmine: staking now drives almost all of its revenue

Bitmine has moved further and faster on this than almost anyone in the sector. As of November 1, 2026, the company held about 6.06 million ETH and had staked about 5.23 million of it (roughly 86% of its position), according to its November 2, 2026 announcement. Bitmine projected annualized staking revenue of about $358 million on that staked ETH, based on its own 7-day yield that week, a figure that moves as the yield does. For the fiscal quarter ended May 31, 2026, staking accounted for about 98% of Bitmine’s total revenue: $45.7 million of $46.5 million.

Cointelegraph reported on August 13, 2026 that staking income “fills” Bitmine’s operational gaps, and Bitfinex analysts quoted in the piece said it funds operations and the company’s share buyback program without Bitmine having to sell any of its Ether. By October 25, 2026, Bitmine had repurchased 22.9 million shares in 2026 (about $400 million) under a $4 billion authorization, according to its October 26 announcement. Staking revenue alone does not pay for a buyback of that size, so the point is narrower: rewards from the staked position are a cash flow the company can use without liquidating the position itself.

SharpLink: a large paper loss, and a staking line that never moved

SharpLink’s Q2 2026 results (the quarter ended June 30, 2026) make the same point from the opposite direction: what a large unrealized price loss looks like next to staking revenue that stayed put.

SharpLink reported total revenue of $11.5 million for the quarter, of which $11.2 million came from staking. At the same time, the company posted a net loss of $394.3 million, sharply wider than the $103.4 million net loss in the same quarter of 2025. The wider loss was driven mainly by a $321 million unrealized loss on its ETH holdings as the token’s price moved against the company’s cost basis, plus a $76.1 million impairment charge on its LsETH and weETH liquid staking tokens, partly offset by a $1.4 million realized gain. As of June 30, 2026, SharpLink held 632,784 native ETH, plus LsETH and weETH liquid staking tokens, for a total of about 887,000 ETH (counting those tokens as if redeemed), and $56.2 million in cash, according to SharpLink’s own Q2 2026 report as covered by StockTitan.

The lesson is not that staking made the quarter a good one. A $394.3 million net loss is a $394.3 million net loss. It’s that the $11.2 million in staking revenue sat entirely apart from the $321 million price swing that dominated the headline number. One is operating income from putting the token to work; the other is a mark-to-market accounting entry that reflects nothing about whether the underlying staking program is working. Conflating the two is exactly the mistake a treasury company’s own reporting is now built to prevent.

What staking revenue actually is, and what it isn’t

This is worth stating plainly. The Bitmine figures and the SharpLink report both describe the same underlying mechanism, whether or not an article explaining it uses the word “THORChain.”

Staking revenue is a reward paid by a network’s own protocol for helping secure it. It is funded by newly issued tokens, transaction fees, or both, depending on the network. It is not a return generated by the token’s price going up, and it does not depend on the market agreeing that the token is worth more today than yesterday. A staking validator earns roughly the same reward, in token terms, whether the token is up 40% or down 40% that quarter. That is exactly why SharpLink’s $11.2 million in staking revenue showed up untouched next to a $321 million price-driven loss.

It is not the same thing as investment return. A shareholder’s actual return on a DAT stock depends on the token’s price, how many shares are outstanding, whether the company is buying back stock or issuing more of it, and how the market prices the company relative to the value of its holdings. None of those factors are offset by staking revenue on its own. It is one input, not the whole answer, and DAT quarterly reports increasingly separate the two for exactly that reason.

For a plain-English walkthrough of how this mechanism works on Ethereum specifically, where the reward actually comes from, and why yields move the way they do as more ETH gets staked, see why Ethereum staking rewards keep shrinking. RUNEBond also maintains a live Ethereum staking profile with current reward-rate data for readers comparing ETH specifically.

The risk side, stated candidly

None of this makes staking free money. A treasury company staking a large position takes on real, specific risk in exchange for that revenue:

• Liquidity risk. Staked tokens are not instantly liquid. Depending on the network and the staking method used, unstaking can involve an exit queue rather than an on-demand withdrawal. Capital committed to staking is capital that is not immediately available if the company needs cash quickly.
• Slashing risk. Most proof-of-stake networks can penalize a validator that misbehaves or goes offline for extended periods by cutting into the staked position itself. It is a real cost, not a hypothetical one, and it scales with the size of the position.
• Concentration risk. When one company holds close to 5% of a network’s total token supply and stakes a large share of it, that company’s own validator infrastructure, or the operators it delegates to, becomes a meaningfully large slice of the network’s overall stake. On Ethereum, the validator set is large (hundreds of thousands of active validators), so 5% of supply is not automatically 5% of the validator count. The operational concentration still matters, both as a systemic consideration for the network and as a counterparty consideration for the company’s own choices.

A treasury company weighing staking against simply holding is making a real trade-off between yield and flexibility, not choosing a free upgrade.

Where RUNEBond fits

Everything above describes a mechanism, not a company-specific trick: a network pays real rewards to whoever helps secure it, funded by the protocol itself rather than by price speculation. THORChain is a cross-chain protocol that runs on this same logic. Its native token, RUNE, can be staked with a node operator (THORChain’s own term for this is bonding). The node operator runs the validating infrastructure while the RUNE holder earns a proportional share of the rewards the node generates from protocol activity.

You do not need to be a public company filing quarterly SEC reports, running validator infrastructure, or managing millions of tokens on a balance sheet to earn that kind of real, protocol-funded yield. RUNEBond connects individual and institutional RUNE holders directly to THORChain node operators, the same way a DAT connects its ETH treasury to a staking program, without requiring anyone to become a treasury company to do it. The parallel is directional, not identical. Ethereum staking uses relatively standardized exit queues and a large, permissionless validator set. Staking RUNE through RUNEBond comes with its own version of the trade-offs above: it is permissioned by the node operator, your exit is tied to THORChain’s churn cycle rather than a fixed unstaking window, and you are trusting a specific operator with performance and a share of rewards. (A churn cycle is the periodic process by which THORChain rotates nodes in and out of the active set.) For the fuller mechanics of how staking with a node works (the whitelist step, the operator’s fee, and what you are actually trusting the operator with), see how THORChain bond providers work. For the broader case that revenue-funded yield beats price-dependent returns, see why real yield beats inflationary yield.

RUNEBond does not take custody of anyone’s RUNE, and it doesn’t quote a fixed APY. Like any staking yield, the rate moves with network conditions, so current figures live in the app rather than in this article.

If you are evaluating a larger RUNE position and want the same kind of structured approach to staking that a treasury company applies to its own holdings, talk to RUNEBond’s institutional team.

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This article is educational and is not financial advice. It reports figures disclosed by third parties as of the dates cited; token prices, staking yields, and company holdings change continuously, so verify current figures before making any decision. RUNEBond does not take custody of user funds.