Institutional attitudes toward bitcoin yield are beginning to shift and there is now renewed interest in BTC rewards after years of skepticism driven by smart-contract risk, leverage, and opaque strategies, GlobalStake co-founder Thomas Chaffee told CoinDesk on Thursday.
Products that allow users to earn a return on their bitcoin holdings often require wrapping BTC into protocols, involving smart contract risk or strategies that don’t scale, so institutions didn’t see “a risk-return profile that made sense,” according to Chaffee.
That reluctance is starting to change, Chaffee said, not because institutions suddenly want more risk, but because the types of strategies available to them have evolved. Rather than protocol-based yield or token incentives, allocators are increasingly gravitating toward fully collateralized, market-neutral approaches that resemble traditional financial strategies already familiar to hedge funds and treasuries, he said.
“The behavior change we’re seeing isn’t institutions chasing yield,” Chaffee said. “It’s institutions finally engaging once the strategies, controls, and infrastructure look like something they can actually deploy capital into at scale.”
The renewed interest comes after years of failed or short-lived attempts to generate yield on bitcoin, many of which unraveled during the 2022 market downturn as prominent lenders froze withdrawals and ultimately collapsed amid liquidity stress, most notably when crypto lending service Celsius Network indefinitely paused withdrawals and transfers citing “‘extreme market conditions’” in mid-2022 and later entered bankruptcy.
Chaffee is not the only one seeing renewed institutional interest in bitcoin yield. “People holding bitcoin, — whether on balance sheet or as investors — increasingly see it as a pot just sitting there,” Richard Green, director of Rootstock Institutional, told CoinDesk recently. “It can’t just sit there doing nothing; it needs to be adding yield.” Green said professional investors now want their digital assets to “work as hard as possible” within their risk mandates.
Chaffee explained that GlobalStake, which provides staking infrastructure across proof-of-stake networks, began hearing the same question repeatedly from clients over the past several years: whether similar institutional-grade yield opportunities existed for bitcoin.
GlobalStake unveiled its Bitcoin Yield Gateway on Thursday, a platform designed to aggregate multiple third-party bitcoin yield strategies behind a single onboarding, compliance, and integration layer.
The co-founder explained the company expects roughly $500 million in bitcoin to be allocated within three months. “We expect the bitcoin to be allocated during the gateway’s first-quarter roll-out period, sourced from a custodial partner based in Canada, demand generated by parties through our partner MG Stover, and our clients, which include family offices, digital asset treasuries (DATs), corporate treasuries, and hedge funds.”
Other firms are approaching the problem from the infrastructure layer. Babylon Labs, for example, is developing systems that allow native bitcoin to be used as non-custodial collateral across financial applications, an effort aimed at expanding BTC’s utility rather than generating yield directly.