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Today, an estimated $2 trillion worth of BTC supply is held in custody or cold storage, and over $172 billion in BTC sits idle on US corporate balance sheets. As institutions, corporations, and funds continue to accumulate Bitcoin, there’s a growing appetite for compliant yield on idle BTC. Mere price exposure provided by ETFs and direct holdings has an opportunity cost. Yields add capital efficiency on top of that exposure.

Bitcoin has, over the years, evolved from simple transfers to enabling metaprotocols like Ordinals, Runes, and BRC-20s. New Bitcoin-aligned layers such as sidechains, rollups, and execution environments enable BTC-native smart contracts, yield, and asset issuance while preserving self-custody and Bitcoin settlement guarantees.

While the retail and speculative frenzy drove Bitcoin’s adoption as a store of value, corporations, institutions, and nation-states are increasingly putting BTC on their balance sheets, especially as it continues to evolve as a yield-bearing asset. It’s the institutions that control the flow of big money, and they’ll be the key players driving the Bitcoin economy going forward.

Amid this backdrop, Finance Magnates interviewed Maestro Co-founder and CEO Marvin Bertin to discuss the institutional adoption of Bitcoin, the rise of Bitcoin-native yield solutions, and much more. His company, Maestro, is an enterprise-grade infrastructure provider tailor-made for BitcoinFi. Marvin has an interesting background, having worked at the biotech company Freenome as an AI engineer building AI models for early cancer detection.

Move to institutional Bitcoin treasury and yield solutions

Marvin told Finance Magnates that while the first wave of adoption was about accumulating Bitcoin on their balance sheets, the second wave is all about making it a productive asset to generate yield and settle trades directly on Bitcoin.

Corporations, funds, and treasuries are holding BTC as a reserve asset rather than a trading position. They are also increasingly pledging it as collateral for loans, margin, and structured products, similar to how they engage in traditional markets.

Maestro recently launched Maestro Institutional, a compliant Bitcoin treasury financial platform that optimizes BTC holdings with tailored yield solutions. It blends traditional finance with on-chain efficiency and security, connecting treasuries, asset managers, custodians, and miners to the global Bitcoin capital market.

“Over $150 billion in institutional BTC lacks access to attractive, sustainable, and compliant yield-bearing products,” noted Marvin. He believes that their solution complements the simple exposure provided by ETFs and direct holdings. It solves a major pain point for institutions by offering in-kind yield, which means the yield is in Bitcoin rather than in a secondary speculative token or wrapped asset.

The current yield solutions fail to meet institutional expectations. “ETFs give exposure but sacrifice the 24/7, borderless benefits of on-chain infrastructure. On the other hand, DeFi protocols do not meet institutional requirements for compliance, privacy, and native-asset settlement,” he added.

Compliant and in-kind BTC yield

Corporate treasuries and funds favor accountability and stewardship, requiring credibility, compliance, and security. They don’t engage in speculative behavior, chasing moonshot risks like memecoins and unsustainable risk.

So, unlike retail investors who use a hot wallet or a hardware wallet to interact with DeFi, all institutional digital assets, especially Bitcoin, are held by custodians. Institutional DeFi requires custodian integration, strict compliance protocols like KYC/AML, risk management, and a privacy model that allows regulatory auditing without revealing sensitive data such as trading strategies.

Most Bitcoin yield opportunities require bridging or wrapping, making institutional BTC holdings vulnerable to security threats and speculative price action on secondary tokens. “Institutions want in-kind yield on their BTC through regulated, insured, and audited interfaces, the same way they earn interest on Treasuries or repurchase agreements,” believes Marvin.

Maestro's specialized platform helps institutions overcome these challenges by abstracting on-chain complexity and offering a reliable in-kind BTC yield while ensuring compliance.

Shifting the focus from developers to institutions

Maestro has been building enterprise-grade BitcoinFi infrastructure for over two years, and has acquired a deep understanding of both institutional needs and Bitcoin-native DeFi. Today, over 250 projects and businesses rely on Maestro’s state-of-the-art indexing framework that processes billions of Bitcoin transaction requests.

Its infrastructure powers leading Bitcoin protocols, including Liquidium ($500M+ volume), Odin.fun ($700M+ volume), and SatsTerminal ($100M+ volume), all with 99.993% uptime. Maestro is also a trusted validator for Bitcoin L2s, including Stacks ($1.2B market cap), Arch, and MIDL, as well as institutional-grade chains such as Canton Network ($3.5 trillion in institutional loans) and Midnight Network.

So, when asked why his company is shifting focus from developers to institutions, Marvin said his goal is to accelerate and expand the Bitcoin economy. And that can happen by meeting institutions where they are. They expect bank-grade controls, clean reporting, and predictable behavior across markets.

After having built the roads and bridges, it’s “time we opened them to the next generation of global finance when institutions are eager to generate compliant yield on their idle BTC.”

Closing thoughts

Over the next decade or so, Marvin believes the Bitcoin-native financial rails will transform how we interact with money at almost every level, driven by innovation, regulatory clarity, and, of course, institutional capital. The payments, capital markets, and other financial primitives built on traditional rails will upgrade to or get replaced by on-chain stablecoins, tokenized equities, and structured products. That will make the capital markets borderless, efficient, available 24/7, with fewer middlemen and lower fees.

Source: Finance Magnates