Article
9 min read time
DeFi yield is becoming a treasury function. Most DATs aren’t set up for it.
Executive Summary
Public companies now hold high-single-digit percentages of BTC, ETH, and SOL total supply, and that number keeps climbing. Staking yields – once a differentiator – are commoditizing as ETFs push toward similar offerings.
The next competitive edge for these treasury vehicles is onchain yield: lending markets, vault-based strategies, and multi-protocol allocations managed by professional risk teams.
Accessing those strategies under the governance, controls, and reporting standards that public companies require is a fundamentally different problem than accessing them at all. This article summarizes five ideas from a new joint report by Gauntlet and Utila that maps out how digital asset treasury companies can close that gap.
What is a Digital Asset Treasury Company?
In August 2020, MicroStrategy (now Strategy, trading as MSTR) bought $250 million in Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset. Michael Saylor’s Strategy framed the move as a hedge against dollar debasement and inflation. The company kept buying. By February 2026, Strategy held approximately 713,500 BTC worth roughly $60 billion, making it the largest corporate holder of the asset. Its stock rose over 1,200% from the first purchase.
That playbook caught on. Companies across sectors used debt, equity offerings, and convertible notes to build treasuries not just in Bitcoin but in Ethereum and Solana:
BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) accumulated 3.8 million ETH.
Forward Industries (FORD) pivoted from medical device accessories to become the largest public Solana treasury, raising $1.65 billion to buy 6.8 million SOL.
Japan’s Metaplanet set a target of holding 1% of Bitcoin’s total supply.
By late 2025, CoinGecko tracked 104 Bitcoin treasury firms alone, holding a combined 1 million+ BTC holdings worth over $115 billion.
These entities – digital asset treasuries, or DAT companies – are publicly traded companies that raise capital specifically to acquire, hold digital assets, and manage them as a core balance-sheet strategy. Their decisions sit under formal oversight: finance leadership, risk committees, board governance, and audit requirements.
How the Rise of Digital Asset Treasury Companies Changed Corporate Finance
The rise of digital asset treasury companies reshaped how public markets think about corporate finance and balance sheets. Before 2020, corporate treasuries held cash, bonds, and money market instruments. Strategy’s Bitcoin purchases introduced a new category of digital asset holdings on public-company balance sheets – one that required new accounting treatment, new risk disclosures, and new investor narratives.
The FASB’s 2023 update to fair value accounting for crypto assets removed a key friction: companies could finally mark digital asset holdings up to market, not just down. That change made it easier for corporate treasury teams to justify holding volatile assets on their balance sheets.
Combined with the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024, institutional access expanded rapidly, and the digital asset ecosystem gained a layer of public-market legitimacy it previously lacked.
For DATs, this created a new competitive dynamic. Simply holding Bitcoin or other digital assets was no longer novel – any company could add digital asset exposure to its balance sheet with a single board resolution. The DATs that attract capital going forward need a business model built around active management, not passive holding.
Why DeFi Yield Entered the DAT Conversation
To make this capital productive, DATs initially turned to staking – and it worked as a differentiator for a while. But custodians now offer staking as standard, and ETFs are moving toward staking parity, compressing the advantage further.
DATs competing for capital need to show they can do more. In this context, onchain yield generation – lending markets, curated vault strategies, stablecoin yield, multi-protocol allocations – is emerging as a treasury management lever alongside exposure management and liquidity management, especially for teams adopting dedicated digital asset treasury operations platforms. These strategies operate through smart contracts and decentralized finance protocols, where capital is deployed programmatically into overcollateralized lending markets, liquidity pools, and vault infrastructure.
But deploying into those venues under public-company governance, regulatory compliance requirements, audit standards, and defined signing authority is an operational problem that most DATs haven’t solved yet.
To address that gap, Utila partnered with Gauntlet to produce a joint report on institutional DeFi yield for DATs. Gauntlet manages over $1 billion in USDC vault TVL and already works with several DATs deploying capital into decentralized finance. Utila provides the MPC wallet infrastructure and policy engine that governs how those allocations execute. Together, they cover both sides of the problem: what to deploy into, and how to deploy safely.
The report, entitled DeFi Yield: A Moat for DATs, is the result of this collaboration and reflects their combined experience working with institutional allocators in DeFi. It maps the full framework across risk management, vault infrastructure, and the execution layer. Below, we present five of its core arguments; the full reasoning and implementation detail is in the report itself.
DATs & ETFs
1. Onchain yield is the next differentiator.
Staking, liquid staking, and restaking are now baseline offerings. Custodians partner with validation-as-a-service providers as standard practice, and ETFs are moving toward staking parity, while enterprise platforms integrate institutional staking across multiple networks directly into their treasury workflows. The report argues that curated vault-based DeFi yield optimization strategies – not staking – will separate DATs that survive consolidation from those that don’t, and lays out why the opportunity cost of idle custody is growing across BTC, ETH, SOL, and stablecoins. For DATs evaluating their capital strategy, the shift from passive holding to active yield generation changes the underlying asset management model entirely.
2. The primary bottleneck is governance, not strategy access.
Vaults handle strategy; DATs handle signing. Vaults allow curators to manage yield strategies while participants retain custody and can withdraw on demand. They simplify strategy management, but they don’t remove the DAT’s execution responsibilities: signing authority, approvals, and policy controls still determine what can be done, by whom, and within which limits. The report draws a clear line – vaults manage how capital is deployed; DATs govern how capital is moved – and notes that execution is the main constraint for most DAT companies. This is especially relevant during periods of market volatility, when the speed and governance of rebalancing decisions directly affect net asset value.
3. Execution quality determines whether yield is actually deployable.
What limits deployment at scale is whether a DAT can execute allocations under its own governance model: defined signing authority, role-based permissions, spend limits, contract allowlists, and attributable audit trails. The report includes cautionary examples from vault infrastructure failures (Yo Protocol’s $3.7M swap error, Makina’s $5M oracle attack) and details the pre-execution review practices that reduce preventable errors at the operational layer. These controls matter because DeFi yield strategies interact with smart contracts that execute autonomously – once a transaction is signed and submitted, there is no undo. The quality of pre-execution checks directly protects balance sheets from operational errors.
4. Capital segmentation and permissioning are core requirements for public DATs.
DATs under public-company reporting standards need enforced separation between idle treasury balances, deployed capital, collateral, and reward flows, which in practice depends on secure, policy-rich digital asset wallet infrastructure at the core of their stack. The report identifies this as a friction point that wallet architecture and permission structure must solve at the infrastructure level – and explains what that looks like in practice as DATs expand across chains and yield verticals. Without proper segmentation, treasury management becomes opaque: auditors cannot distinguish between held and deployed capital, and the net asset value reported on balance sheets may not reflect the actual liquidity position of the DAT.
5. The custody model is shifting. Non-custodial MPC is gaining regulatory ground.
In December 2025, a whitepaper submitted to the SEC’s Crypto Task Force proposed modernizing the Custody Rule to allow MPC-based safeguarding outside of traditional Qualified Custodians. The report explores what this shift means for DAT yield deployment workflows and how the choice between a QC and non-custodial infrastructure is becoming one of operational fit rather than regulatory necessity. This development is part of a broader evolution in how blockchain technology is being recognized within existing regulatory compliance frameworks for digital asset custody, including tighter integration between execution infrastructure and enhanced AML/KYT capabilities.
How DeFi Yield Differs from Traditional Asset Yield
DATs coming from a corporate finance background may be familiar with yield on traditional assets – bonds, money markets, and fixed-income instruments. DeFi yield works differently. Returns are generated programmatically through smart contracts: overcollateralized lending protocols charge borrowers interest that flows to lenders, liquidity pools distribute trading fees to providers, and vault strategies allocate capital across multiple protocols to capture risk-adjusted returns.
The key distinction is that DeFi yield operates onchain, with transparent and verifiable mechanics, but also with risks specific to the digital asset ecosystem: smart contract vulnerabilities, oracle failures, and liquidity crunches during market volatility, all of which intersect directly with how institutions design their digital asset trading operations. A DAT’s treasury strategy must account for these risks explicitly. The report covers how risk managers like Gauntlet model and monitor these factors across the crypto assets in their vaults, and how the execution layer provides the operational guardrails that corporate treasury teams require, including integrations with institutional AML monitoring solutions to keep DeFi allocations compliant.
Where Utila and Gauntlet Fit
The report maps responsibilities across three layers: risk management, vault infrastructure, and the execution layer. Gauntlet operates as risk manager and vault curator – modeling risk, performing collateral due diligence, monitoring liquidity management around the clock, and allocating capital across yield opportunities through infrastructure like Aera.
Utila sits in the execution layer: governed transaction authorization, policy enforcement, and audit logging for onchain allocation workflows. Deposits, withdrawals, and rebalances execute under defined roles, limits, and allowlists. For broader venue and counterparty access, Utila Link extends controlled connectivity to regulated yield-as-a-service providers while keeping approvals and policies consistent.
This modular approach means DATs can integrate Utila’s MPC wallet infrastructure with their existing regulatory compliance and risk frameworks – including their choice of KYT/AML provider and security co-signer – rather than replacing their current treasury management stack, while still benefiting from scalable multi-chain digital asset wallet infrastructure.
Who Is This Report For?
This report is built for DAT CFOs and treasury leads evaluating yield as part of treasury strategy, operations teams responsible for execution workflows and controls, risk and compliance teams defining guardrails, and infrastructure partners supporting DAT operating models, many of whom may want to request a demo of Utila’s platform to see these workflows in practice.
Onchain yield is becoming a practical consideration for digital asset treasury companies, but the operating requirements differ from crypto-native trading desks, particularly for those also exploring stablecoin-powered payment flows as part of their broader treasury and settlement strategy.
The full report covers the governance framework, execution architecture, and implementation considerations for scaling allocations responsibly, including how dedicated stablecoin operations platforms can plug into DAT workflows without compromising controls.
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