Month: April 2025

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitwise Debuts Option Income ETFs on Bitcoin Treasury Stocks: MSTR, MARA, COIN

Bitwise has introduced three new ETFs that provide yield-seeking investors with exposure to leading Bitcoin treasury companies, using a covered call strategy designed to capitalize on equity volatility while preserving Bitcoin-linked upside.

The funds include:

$IMST, tracking Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy, ticker: MSTR), which currently holds 528,185 BTC.

$IMRA, focused on MARA Holdings (MARA), a top-tier Bitcoin miner with 47,600 BTC in treasury.

$ICOI, offering exposure to Coinbase (COIN), which holds 9,480 BTC and serves as a key on-ramp for institutional and retail Bitcoin adoption.

Each ETF employs an actively managed options overlay, writing out-of-the-money calls on the underlying equity while maintaining a long position. This approach is designed to deliver monthly income distributions—particularly attractive in today’s high-volatility environment—while retaining meaningful upside exposure to Bitcoin-linked companies.

While none of the funds directly hold Bitcoin, all three underlying equities are deeply intertwined with Bitcoin’s performance and trajectory. Strategy and Marathon are among the most prominent corporate holders of BTC, while Coinbase continues to serve as critical infrastructure for the broader ecosystem.

New Tools for Bitcoin-Aligned Capital Allocation

For corporate treasurers and institutional allocators who view Bitcoin as a long-term strategic asset, these new products represent a compelling way to gain indirect exposure while generating yield—especially in balance sheets that can’t yet directly hold BTC.

The rise of equity-based strategies like this is part of a broader shift. More public companies are actively integrating Bitcoin into their financial models, whether through direct holdings or through services and operations tied to Bitcoin mining, custody, or exchange infrastructure.

What Bitwise is offering is not just exposure, but a way to monetize volatility—something that Bitcoin-native companies experience more than most. Whether it’s MSTR stock reacting to Bitcoin’s price swings, MARA stock tracking mining difficulty and rewards, or Coinbase stock responding to changes in trading volume and regulatory sentiment, these equities are increasingly used as BTC proxies by sophisticated investors.

In recent months, institutional interest in Bitcoin ETFs, mining stocks, and companies with Bitcoin treasuries has intensified, and tools like IMST, IMRA, and ICOI provide a new angle on that demand. For companies already on a Bitcoin treasury path—or considering one—this evolution in capital markets infrastructure is notable.

What This Signals for Bitcoin Treasury Strategy

The launch of these ETFs reflects how Bitcoin is no longer just a spot asset—it’s now embedded in public equity strategy, yield generation, and portfolio construction.

Covered call structures won’t be right for every investor or treasury, but the signal is clear: the market is maturing around the idea that Bitcoin isn’t just to be held—it can be actively managed, structured, and monetized in new ways.

These new ETFs won’t replace direct holdings on a corporate balance sheet. But they may complement them—or offer a first step for firms exploring how to position around Bitcoin while still meeting traditional risk, yield, and reporting mandates.

Disclaimer: This content was written on behalf of Bitcoin For Corporations. This article is intended solely for informational purposes and should not be interpreted as an invitation or solicitation to acquire, purchase, or subscribe for securities.

This post Bitwise Debuts Option Income ETFs on Bitcoin Treasury Stocks: MSTR, MARA, COIN first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nick Ward.

Bitcoin Magazine

Covenants, CTV, And Making Things Easier For Developers

Builder: Stu

Language(s): Rust

Contributes To: CTV Prototypes, Char Network

Work(s/ed) At: ZBD

Before Bitcoin, Stu spent his days working as a Windows System Administrator and in IT Support. His routine consisted of long boring days of sitting in a chair engaging in monotonous maintenance work, reconfiguring systems, and resetting passwords for users who’d forgotten them.

It was the kind of job where a problem occurring that actually requires you to engage your attention in a meaningful way is so rare an occurrence that you wind up sitting around hoping for something like that to happen most of the time. 

Stu spent most days just browsing through Reddit threads during his copious amounts of downtime. But this turned out to not be such a bad scenario in the end, as this was how Stu found himself pulled into the Bitcoin space around 2017. 

Like many Bitcoiners, or rather soon-to-be Bitcoiners, back in that period, Stu got sucked into the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and altcoin frenzy of the time. Also, like many Bitcoiners around that time, he wound up getting burned financially by some bad investments in random unknown projects in which he probably shouldn’t have invested in the first place.

Inevitably the gravity of Bitcoin pulled him down the proverbial rabbit hole. 

After a few years of learning more deeply about Bitcoin, Stu hit a period of frenzy and quit his job at the peak of the 2021 bull market to look for opportunities to work in the Bitcoin space. By that time the programming language Rust had become widely used in different Bitcoin projects and libraries, so Stu began learning it so that he could contribute to Bitcoin. 

Towards the end of 2022, his search for a job in the space ended when he was hired by Michael Tildwell to work at ZBD, a company that integrates bitcoin payments into videogames using the Lightning Network. 

Working At ZBD 

Stu worked DevOps at ZBD, but in his free time he kept working at prototype Rust projects.

“Most of my side projects are related to what I was interested in at the time, as I was working at ZBD I started making games that could use bitcoin,” Stu told Bitcoin Magazine. 

To start, he built a multiplayer web game, rain.run, based around players collecting lightning bolts for rewards in satoshis, to get more familiar with building applications that have to talk to each other over a network. Afterwards he built a simple connect4 game played over the Nostr protocol. 

“[This] was a great way to learn how Nostr worked,” said Stu.

“I attended btc++ in Austin in 2024, which was the Script edition.” The four day conference was the most dense forum for discussion around Bitcoin script improvements and covenants in the last year or so. 

“There seemed to be, at the time, some kind of consensus developing for covenants on Bitcoin,” recalled Stu.

“This got me really interested in how Bitcoin script worked and [led] me to experimenting with Taproot and Bitcoin scripts…” he added.

“I didn’t really end up with much but it was a great way to learn how scripts worked.” 

TABConf, Payment Pools, and CTV

In 2024, Stu attended TABConf, another developer-focused conference, which is held yearly in Atlanta, Georgia. The conversations in Atlanta also revolved heavily around covenants. 

Like all developer-focused conferences, TABConf put on a hackathon. Stu chose to build a project using Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs), which enabled users to bet on the outcome of  chess matches. It became very obvious to Stu that building software around pre-signing large numbers of transactions introduced a lot of complexity for developers. 

Discussing this issue, he said: “The answer to this problem seemed to be CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY (CTV). As I wanted to learn more about covenants, CTV seemed like a good place to start, so I started integrating CTV into my DLC chess project. I couldn’t believe how simple it made everything…” 

Stu went on to build a proof-of-concept prototype of a Payment Pool using CTV. Payment pools are a very basic layer 2 system where groups of larger than two share control over a single unspent bitcoin output. 

“One way we can scale bitcoin to be used by everyone, without using centralized third parties, is for users to share UTXO’s,” he said when asked why he chose to work on a proof-of-concept for a payment pool. “Payment pools are a great way to do this, especially alongside other layer 2 solutions such as Lightning or Ark.” 

Covenants

Covenants have become a contentious issue in the discussion about where to take Bitcoin going forward. Every developer has their personal opinion on them, and Stu is no exception. 

“I think using covenants to replace pre-signed transactions alone is an amazing improvement for developers to build faster and safer,” he said. “It removes a lot of interactivity and friction for users, so there is less need for them to be online or coordinate with other parties, which can improve the user experience by a great deal.” 

I asked him if this is what drew him to building proof-of-concepts and prototypes using CTV as opposed to other covenant proposals.

“I was drawn to CTV because it was so simple to implement in the applications I wanted to build. Once I built the payment pool with CTV, I was planning on doing the same for all covenant proposals. I figured out how to get the exact same functionality with CAT, but it just took a very long time to get working, and added way more code. The Bitcoin script was like 50 lines of code, compared to CTV with like 3 lines.”

“I’m pretty sure there is consensus between protocol developers that there is no risk to Bitcoin if we enabled CTV…” he said. “…so the argument now seems to be that the users don’t want it. But the users are already using applications and protocols such as Lightning and multisig vaults that would be improved by CTV. So…I think it should be the priority for the next soft fork…”

When asked about the current contentious nature of the discussion around covenants and the next soft fork, and how the atmosphere could be improved, he had this to say:

“Someone needs to get Saylor to tweet a sandwich emoji and everything will be good.”

“But seriously, I don’t really know. Maybe more in person events where people can discuss face to face would help. It doesn’t seem like much of a technical reason that we aren’t making progress, more of a political one,” he went on to say in a more serious tone. 

“I think some of the hesitance is more around making any change at all to Bitcoin. The reason it is so hard to change is an amazing property of Bitcoin, but it doesn’t have to extend to soft forks quite so much. It causes a lot of stress for certain Bitcoin developers, especially Bitcoin Core maintainers. Everyone is waiting on their opinion on the next fork, which seems to make them hesitant on joining in the conversation at all, which makes it hard to get consensus on any new change,” he said. 

The Future

Stu recently participated in the Bitcoin Open Source Software (BOSS) program by Chaincode Labs, a program designed as a way for developers new to the Bitcoin ecosystem to cut their teeth and quickly develop a deeper understanding of and experience with building on Bitcoin. 

Going forward Stu is going to contribute to the Char Network, a somewhat off the radar effort to build a new bitcoin staking platform led by Jeremy Rubin, the developer who designed and proposed CTV. He plans to continue working on his personal side projects and contributing to open source projects as well, with the eventual goal of starting to contribute to Bitcoin Core itself. 

Stu had this to say about Bitcoiners’ priorities going into the future: 

“Our number one focus should be on making self custody better. It really sucks right now, and I think more Bitcoiners in general need to admit that. Backing up 12 words does sound simple, but it really isn’t that easy, and no one is doing it.” 

This post Covenants, CTV, And Making Things Easier For Developers first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

Bitcoin Magazine

Post Wook: Surreal and Immersive Art on Bitcoin & the Future of Digital Expression

As the Bitcoin Conference 2025 approaches, set for May 27-29th at the Venetian in Las Vegas, digital artist Post Wook—known for her surreal, psychedelic landscapes that merge cosmic and natural elements—is set to bring her latest series, “The Astronomer’s Daughter” to a large audience of bitcoiners. In tribute to her father, a long-time NASA employee, this ordinals series uniquely merges satellite data and bitcoin block times, alongside seasonal and astronomical patterns such as the phases of the moon. Post Wook will showcase this work as part of both B25 and the off-site ordinals event, Inscribing Vegas.  

I caught up with Post Wook to discuss her latest digital art series, the future of immersive art, and the experience of seeing her work featured on the Sphere in Las Vegas.

The Las Vegas Sphere has quickly become the principal attraction on the Las Vegas Strip. What was it like to see your artwork, “Everywhere but Inward,” displayed on the Sphere for the first time?

It honestly felt very surreal! Having worked on the piece for over a year, I was super familiar with the animation sequencing, but seeing it actually on the Sphere for the first time felt so cool. The Sphere is LARGE, and you think you know that when you see photos, but then when you see it in real life it blows you away. We got to our lookout spot in Vegas about 15-20 min before it popped up in the programming, and once it actually came on it felt so wild! I think I started clapping. I never do that. I was just so happy to be in the moment.

The Sphere is one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated immersive platforms, featuring a 16K resolution interior and an exterior LED display that spans over 580,000 square feet. How does the scale of the Sphere’s surface affect the viewer’s perception of your digital artwork? You’re no stranger to fantastical landscapes or extra-perceptionary vistas, so this must have been especially interesting to take in.

The actual process of animating Everywhere but Inward, 2024 for Sphere was interesting because with a screen that big the animation had to be a lot slower than I’d normally animate. So honestly, watching the animation as an equirectangular piece on my monitor felt like watching paint dry. But watching it on Sphere, it feels like a regular animation. I guess that’s just showbiz. 

On the whole I’m just excited to see digital art take center stage. With Sphere in Vegas becoming literally the talk of the strip to the new Sphere they’re building in Dubai, it’s pretty obvious that digital art is on the rise and is becoming increasingly legitimate to the world around us.

The ephemeral nature of a public display on the Sphere contrasts with the permanence and immutability of on-chain art. How do you view the tension between the grandeur of public spectacle and the private, immutable ownership of digital art? Does this shift in how art is owned and experienced influence your approach to creating and presenting your work?

I sort of look at it like ‘exterior’ and ‘interior’ work with Sphere showing people that digital art is cool and on-chain art reinforces that digital art is valuable. The public spectacle brings people in and on-chain ownership provides traceable provenance. I’d like to think I balance that tension well. By having licensed work in Target and auctions in Sotheby’s, I’m able to find solace in providing art at every level because I really believe art is for everyone, and everyone deserves a little bit of POST WOOK finery in their lives.

On the other hand, on-chain art has broken open the door for me to become a mad scientist for my ‘upper end’ artwork by creating art that uses blockchain as a medium, and honestly it’s become some of my favorite art to make. I’ve always had a soft spot for research, so being able to combine complex data sets and my creativity feels like a dream. To off-chain people, I like to explain this work sort of like the photographs from Harry Potter, except instead of using magic to animate the images, we use code and blockchain. 

I find it even cooler that I get to sit down with collectors that share my same data-driven interests and chat about the future of digital art. I honestly have to pinch myself sometimes because I feel like I truly have the best of both worlds with creating meticulously detailed on-chain art and aesthetically pleasing retail art.

Tell us more about “The Astronomer’s Daughter” series, and what can Bitcoin Conference or Inscribing Vegas attendees expect to see from this series in May? I heard a rumor that your dad might be making the trip.

The Astronomer’s Daughter has sort of become my favorite little brainchild, and it’s been really fun to watch it blossom. It’s a collection that honors my dad’s legacy working for NASA through the blended use of satellite data and my artistic style. I chose 100 rare satoshis with varying levels of astronomical and on-chain significance to showcase what happened in space that day. 

Of all the various components, the moon phases are accounted for as the moon displayed in each image, the constellation the moon passes through is represented by the color of the sky, any planets close to earth are displayed accordingly, the month and the season are shown as the landscape in the image, solar holidays (equinoxes and solstices) are recorded, and there’s a chromatic filter on top of every image based on the year of the satoshi to tie it all together.

Each piece is then pulled together using recursion and inscribed directly on the satoshi that the artwork represents. 

In May, I’m debuting five (5) physical shadow boxes of select pieces from The Astronomer’s Daughter to showcase each layer of the artwork, acting almost as a physical representation of each recursive element. These pieces will be on display in the Bitcoin Conference Las Vegas, and they’ll be a sight to see! And yes, Father Wook might even be there but I don’t want to give too much away – people will have to come see for themselves!

See Post Wook’s artwork at both Bitcoin Conference Las Vegas and Inscribing Vegas. Tickets for these events, along with access to a full range of after parties, are available as part of the Bitcoin Week bundle here: https://b.tc/conference/2025/bitcoin-week.

This post Post Wook: Surreal and Immersive Art on Bitcoin & the Future of Digital Expression first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch.

Bitcoin Magazine

Rep. Keith Ammon Is New Hampshire’s Premier Bitcoin Advocate

On Tuesday, Rep. Keith Ammon addressed a New Hampshire House Ways and Means Committee on House Bill (HB) 302, which would permit the state’s treasurer to invest in bitcoin.

In speaking to the committee, he brought up the United States’ excessive debt and made the case for the state of New Hampshire to invest in bitcoin as a means to mitigate the ravaging effects of inflation.

As I listened to his petition, I got the sense that Rep. Ammon was a dyed-in-the-wool Bitcoiner, someone inside of the system doing his best to get members of the legislature of the state he calls home to see in bitcoin what he likely saw in it many moons ago.

After speaking with Rep. Ammon, I’ve learned that this is, in fact, the case.

The software developer and self-described “Bitcoin maxi” (who admits to also seeing some value in other blockchains and crypto projects) found Bitcoin two years after its inception and has been spreading the word about it in New Hampshire ever since.

As the founder of the New Hampshire Blockchain Council and a state representative who is the lead sponsor on the three current Bitcoin- and crypto-related bills in the state that are currently working their way through the legislative process, Rep. Ammon is perhaps the most notable Bitcoin advocate in The Granite State.

And the story of how he found Bitcoin is bad ass to boot.

Based on how you spoke at Tuesday’s committee hearing about HB302, I got the impression that you’re a long-time Bitcoiner. Is this the case?

Yes, and I’ll start by going way back. I heard about something called the Free State Project in 2004, and I moved up to New Hampshire to be part of that. Years later, I attended an event called Liberty Forum, which is an annual event put on by the Free State Project. In 2011, there were a bunch of anarchists that didn’t like the agenda of the forum — it was too corporate for them. So, they rented a couple of rooms at the hotel where the event was held and they had their own event, which they called the “Alt Expo”. I wandered into it and just happened to sit in the room. There were maybe six people there. They had a slide projector and they were talking about the precursor to Ripple, or XRP, which was RipplePay. It was pre-blockchain, but it was some kind of system of nodes and you would lend people money and IOUs would flow back and forth. It just didn’t click for me, though. But I kept in touch with that small group of people, and, a few months later, the idea of Bitcoin popped out of another discussion with them. I remember being like, “Wow, this is amazing. This is the thing that is going to change the world.”

Did you grasp it right away?

I come from a software development background, and I read books like The Creature From Jekyll Island in my early twenties, so my brain was primed to receive the concepts related to Bitcoin and the light bulb went off very early. I had a lot of understanding about big, abstract systems, which is basically what Bitcoin is. But then also the game theory behind it is just amazing. Bitcoin is like a virus that inhabits the human mind and spreads from person to person.

What has it been like trying to spread it to other members of government?

So, fast forward to 2015 — I was elected to the state legislature. We tried proposing a few Bitcoin-related bills around that time, but nobody understood Bitcoin back then. However, I’ve kept with it, and now it’s at the point where I’m a subject matter expert within our legislature. I’m in my fifth term, and Bitcoin has become more mainstream. Other politicians in New Hampshire reach out to me whenever they hear something positive about Bitcoin. Well, they reach out with negative news, too, but lately, there’s been a lot of positive news. So, I’m finding it a little easier to bring the legislature up to speed.

You’ve done a lot of work shifting the Overton window regarding Bitcoin in New Hampshire. And, in the committee hearing on Tuesday, you talked about using bitcoin as a tool to hedge against U.S. dollar debasement. You mentioned that the U.S. federal government is $36 trillion dollars in debt and that it will have to print more money to meet its debt obligations. How do people in government react when you bring up tough truths like this and propose bitcoin as a solution?

Our national debt is a very harsh reality that people often just overlook. However, there are quite a few gold bugs in our legislature, and they’re from the sound money school of thought. But the majority in the legislature, and just people in general, view the national debt like an asteroid that’s coming — we can see it coming, but we still have to get up and go to work every day. It’s a scenario where, unless you really fixate on what’s happening, you tend to not focus on it because it’s such a big problem. If it ever escalates and snowballs, it could cause massive chaos in society. We don’t want that to happen, and we can see that there is an alternative with bitcoin. You can pick up your marbles and switch teams. You don’t have to suffer the consequences. Well, you’ll be affected on some level if society starts crumbling, but you can limit some of the consequences, or at least protect your personal sovereignty and wealth. And I look at this for the state. The conversation on Tuesday was about enabling the state treasurer to invest in digital assets that have a market cap of $500 billion or more. We’re trying to get all these conversations moving within the state government so that when it becomes a little more obvious that bitcoin is a solution to inflation, or the country going bankrupt, God forbid, the state government’s members are primed to receive this message.

I’m sure it’s easier to get politicians to see the problem than it is to convince them that bitcoin is a solution, though. Are you getting a lot of pushback on HB302?

With that particular bill, we worked with the Satoshi Action Fund. I’ve gotten to be buddies with Dennis Porter and Eric Peterson. We started with one of their pieces of model legislation. The first thing we did was we met with the state treasurer. Dennis and his team showed up and I had a couple of people there from the Blockchain Council. We sat in the treasurer’s office and talked with her about it. She was not 100% familiar with bitcoin, but was open to the idea of learning more about it. She also commented that her colleagues around the country are beginning to talk about digital assets. After this discussion, we refined the bill. We amended it in the Commerce Committee, which is the first committee it went through. After that, we talked to the state treasurer again about the amendments. She said that the state treasury department may not invest in bitcoin right away but that it would be nice to have another tool in the toolbox, another potential asset to invest in.

HB302 stipulates that only digital assets with a market cap of over $500 billion can be included in the reserve. As of now, only bitcoin meets this criteria. How did you come up with this number and do you foresee a number of other digital assets eventually being added to the reserve?

There has to be some kind of threshold, because we don’t want anyone to get the idea that the state treasurer might invest in meme coins. However, we can’t explicitly say “bitcoin” in the legislation.

Why not?

It would be seen as picking winners and losers. Good legislation should be rational and unbiased.

What is the likelihood that HB302 passes?

Well, so it’s likely going to pass the House, and then it will go to the Senate. I think there’s a higher than 50% chance that it passes the Senate. The problem is when the House passes some bills and the Senate knows that there’s a priority on the House side, they attach their stuff to it when the bill comes over. Because of this, sometimes bills can die in that crossfire between the two chambers.

Are politicians in New Hampshire’s government now taking the idea of a bitcoin or digital asset reserve more seriously because they’re seeing members of other state governments put forth bills that propose the creation of such reserves in other states?

I don’t know. There are really only a handful of members of New Hampshire’s legislative body that are paying attention to this. I try to stress when I testify that the last one in the pool when it comes to bitcoin loses. In other words, we don’t want to be the last state to buy bitcoin, because its price will rise significantly in the meantime, especially if other states start buying first. There’s still some skepticism about Bitcoin. All these false narratives — like that its energy use is going to melt the planet or that it’s only used by criminals, terrorists, and drug dealers — are still pervasive. As new people try to wrap their head around it, they often default to discrediting it as quickly as possible, because, after they do that, they don’t have to think about it anymore. So, these same arguments just keep being brought up by new people who are still trying to figure it out. The same thing happens in our legislature. However, now that the Trump administration is talking seriously about it, talking about how we’re going to be a Bitcoin country, that really breaks some walls down. Now, even if they don’t fully understand it, they’ll at least take it more seriously.

If HB302 is passed and the state treasurer begins buying bitcoin, what sort of custodial setup do you imagine the state creating?

Everything moves at a snail’s pace in government, so the most likely scenario is that they purchase some shares of say the Fidelity spot bitcoin ETF at first. Fidelity is like one of the largest employers in New Hampshire. That carries a lot of clout. So, I’d imagine they would invest a small amount into a vehicle like that. But as time goes on, the state’s being able to self custody bitcoin is important. I’d imagine they probably don’t want to do it on their own because they’d be afraid of losing their keys. They’d probably like an institutional shared custody situation, like what Unchained or other companies offer — custody across institutions with a multisig.

One issue that hasn’t been coming up in a lot of Bitcoin- and crypto-related legislation is crypto mixers and their legality. Plus, the Samourai Wallet and Tornado Cash developers are still on trial, despite many other crypto cases being thrown out under the Trump administration. What are your thoughts on crypto mixers? Should Americans be allowed to use them?

Yes. Financial privacy is super important. It’s bad if you purchase a cup of coffee and the merchant that owns the shop that you spend your couple of sats at can see your entire bitcoin balance. Financial privacy is huge, and it’s something that we can’t give up. So, however that’s done, it should be protected.

Any final thoughts?

Yeah, there’s a lot of scamminess in the crypto space, and it gets so annoying. Bitcoin is the opposite. It’s the hard truth. If you understand Bitcoin, you value the truth, you value honesty and transparency. It gets kind of old to always have to dodge these scammy bullets from the larger crypto ecosystem. The truth is going to win in the end. Many other projects in the space are just noise — a big smoke screen.

This post Rep. Keith Ammon Is New Hampshire’s Premier Bitcoin Advocate first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Frank Corva.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Startups Raised Nearly $1.2 Billion

New research from venture capital firm Trammell Venture Partners (TVP) highlights continued growth in bitcoin native startup activity, with nearly $1.2 billion raised by early-stage companies between 2021 and 2024. Despite a broader downturn in crypto and tech venture capital markets during 2023 and 2024, Bitcoin-specific startup formation and funding showed resilience, particularly at the Pre-Seed stage.

According to the 2024 edition of TVP’s Bitcoin-Native Venture Capital Landscape Research Brief, Bitcoin Pre-Seed startup transaction volume rose 767% compared to 2021, signalling a maturing and sustained venture category. In 2024 alone, Pre-Seed transaction counts increased 50% year-over-year, while the overall deal count for Bitcoin-native startups grew by 31.8%.

“One or two years’ data might represent an anomaly, but with four consecutive years of year-over-year growth at the earliest stage of Bitcoin startup formation, the data now confirm a sustained, long-term venture category trend,” said Christopher Calicott, Managing Director at TVP.

TVP defines a Bitcoin-native company as one whose product success is inherently aligned with Bitcoin’s success and which leverages the Bitcoin protocol stack in its core operations.

While overall venture capital dollars in the crypto sector declined, TVP’s findings show that Bitcoin-specific investments bucked the trend. In 2024, Bitcoin-native deals made up a growing share of venture activity, with notable participation from institutional VC firms such as Draper Associates, Founders Fund, Y Combinator, and Ribbit Capital.

TVP’s report excluded mining operations and late-stage outlier deals to focus on early-stage software and infrastructure startups. The data set includes activity from 2021 through 2024 and aims to offer clarity to allocators seeking long-term exposure to Bitcoin’s startup ecosystem.

The full report is available for download via TVP’s official website.

This post Bitcoin Startups Raised Nearly $1.2 Billion first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Vivek Sen Bitcoin.