Digital asset treasuries have matured into distinct strategies, but the same work sits under all of them: holding and staking the asset well. Here I share how SVRN does it, and where Fireblocks and Figment fit in.
I've spent years investing in crypto, and a good number of those years backing and building around NEAR specifically, well before SVRN existed. So I watched the digital asset treasury model emerge from close range. When the first of these companies appeared, the proposition was straightforward. You put a digital asset on a public balance sheet and let investors own the performance of that asset through a regulated equity. It was a clean idea, and it opened access for people who couldn't easily hold the asset directly. What I cared about, then and now, was the network it pointed at, and what a company built this way might do to help that network grow.
In the time since those first companies, the category has developed real range, and the businesses inside it are no longer all trying to do the same thing. Some concentrate on disciplined accumulation and staking, giving shareholders efficient, compounding exposure to a single asset that's held to a high standard. That is a legitimate strategy, and for plenty of investors it's precisely what they're looking for. Others, SVRN among them, treat the treasury as the base of an operating business whose purpose is to grow the value of the underlying network itself. The distance between those approaches will matter more to shareholders over time than it does now.
Whatever a given company's strategy, and however much of its effort goes to the asset versus the business built around it, the same job sits underneath everything. Someone has to hold the asset and stake it securely. It's the lifeblood, the foundation of a treasury company, and it's where I want to spend most of this piece.
No single point of failure
Our primary reserve asset is NEAR, and how we custody and stake it sits at the bedrock of our business. I came to this from the other side of the table. At KPMG I ran an advisory practice that helped institutions reason through these exact risks. Before that I worked inside one of the largest traditional custodians in the world, and after that I ran multiple venture funds, where a single operational mistake doesn't come with a do-over. Custody stopped being an administrative function years ago and became a technical discipline that a serious institution has to own.
A digital asset is a bearer asset that settles with irreversible finality, and a traditional treasury desk has never had to hold anything quite like it. When you move it, the transaction clears in seconds, and there is no recall and no chargeback to fall back on. Traditional finance spent a century building controls on the assumption that most mistakes can eventually be unwound. The control environment onchain has to be designed for a world where the first attempt is the only attempt. That same permanence is what turns your counterparties into your largest source of risk. A mistake on their side settles just as quickly, and just as finally, as a mistake on yours.
Qualified custodians have spent the better part of a decade hardening their environments. Even so, residual risk never reaches zero, and the insurance market hasn't kept pace with the size of the assets it would need to cover. By rough industry figures, a custodian can be securing well north of $100 billion in assets against a few hundred million dollars of coverage. I don't say that to criticize any single provider, because it reflects what underwriters are willing to write when one security event could run into the billions. If you're holding a position of real size, insurance won't get you out of concentration risk, so you have to engineer around it.
The principle we run the treasury by follows directly from that math, that no single failure should ever be able to reach the entire position. In practice, that means distributing the position across multiple qualified custodians, so that one insider or one flawed software deployment can't take the whole reserve down with it. The closest analog in traditional finance is the cash-sweep network, where deposits are spread across banks to stay within per-account FDIC limits. The concept carries over directly, even if the execution is far harder, because operating digital custody to an institutional standard is a different discipline from managing fiat accounts. The most sophisticated issuers already work this way. Bitwise structured its product around multiple custodians from the start, and BlackRock recently added Anchorage alongside Coinbase. At real scale, a single point of failure becomes a risk you can't reasonably defend to a regulator or a shareholder.
Staking without giving up custody
For most of the past few years, earning staking rewards meant moving assets out of qualified custody, or taking on validator and slashing risk that a conservative treasury has no business carrying. That created a real tension between putting a position to work and protecting it to an institutional standard, and I never accepted that the two had to be traded off against each other. It's a design problem, and it's now solvable. A position can stay under qualified custody and still earn the network's staking rewards.
The reason to stake at all is that it keeps the treasury productive. NEAR that only sits in custody is a position on price alone. NEAR that is staked earns the network's reward for helping to secure it, and those rewards accrue back to the position and compound over time. None of this matters if the underlying position isn't held responsibly, which is why we hold a staking provider to the same high standard we hold a custodian.
Choosing who holds the position
The bar is specific, and it hasn't moved. A provider needs a cybersecurity program with independent attestations and a real track record behind it. Its insurance has to be scoped honestly against what it actually excludes, rather than what the top-line number implies. Its financial stability has to be something you can verify yourself. It needs the right regulatory license with a clean compliance record under it, and an operating model that a public company can run inside its own controls. A provider that satisfies all of that can hold part of the reserve, and one that satisfies most of it cannot, because this isn't an area where partial credit means anything.
The stakes rise with the size of the position, and ours has us building toward managing on the order of 10% of NEAR's token supply. Staking a position of that size is central to how the treasury compounds, and we run it to an institutional standard. The larger the position grows, the harder it becomes to justify entrusting all of it to any single provider, however capable.
SVRN already holds and stakes its NEAR across a network of qualified custodians and institutional staking providers. This week, we shared that Fireblocks Trust Company, the NYDFS-chartered qualified custodian, handles custody, and Figment handles staking for a portion of our NEAR holdings. They are not the only partners we work with across custody and staking, and we'll be sharing more about our partners in the coming weeks.
Why we built SVRN this way
Everything to this point is about protecting the position. The reason to do it inside a public company is that the same structure can also grow it. When SVRN's shares trade above the value of the NEAR behind them, we can raise capital, acquire more NEAR, and leave every share backed by more NEAR than it was before. Staking works in the same direction underneath, compounding the holding over time. A fund can give an investor exposure to NEAR, and some of the newer products even stake it on the holder's behalf. What a fund cannot do is issue new equity and increase the amount of NEAR standing behind each share. The figure we hold ourselves accountable to is NEAR per share, and the direction it's moving.
That covers how we hold the position and how we grow it. The reason we organized a public company around this particular network is harder to put on a balance sheet, and it's the part I care about most.
NEAR is building the infrastructure for an economy where software agents act for people directly, moving value and making decisions on their behalf. Whether that economy ends up serving the people inside it or the platforms sitting on top of them depends on what runs underneath. Built on infrastructure that leaves people in control of their own assets and data, it becomes technology that enables individual sovereignty rather than quietly eroding it. That is the outcome SVRN exists to push toward, and NEAR is where we believe it gets built.
So our job doesn't end at holding NEAR. We put substantial effort into making it more valuable, by driving commercial adoption of NEAR's infrastructure and bringing it to institutional scale. That points the treasury and the operating business at the same outcome, which is a larger and more widely used network. When NEAR grows, the NEAR behind every SVRN share grows with it. For a shareholder, that ties the return to the thing we are actually trying to build.
What pulled me into this nascent category was the chance to impact a network I'd believed in for years. A treasury company can actually be one of the most effective ways to contribute to the growth of its underlying network. That is the version of treasury I wanted to build for NEAR, and it's why I moved from investing in the ecosystem to running a company built around it.
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