#13 Why Your Company Is Losing Money Every Month, Even When It Looks Profitable
From Dead Cash to Living Treasury
There is a silent truth that most companies have not yet fully grasped: every day they keep their treasury in fiat, they are losing power, independence, and future value. You don’t see it in the short term, but it eats into the balance sheet over time. That is precisely where Bitcoin stops being an investment and becomes an architectural necessity.
When I build and operate companies, I always think about the resilience of the balance sheet. How to resist inflation, currency risk, or events beyond my control. A company can have a strong brand and loyal clients, and still be exposed to the invisible risk of holding a melting currency. If your reserves are in fiat that loses 8% of purchasing power every year, in five years you have destroyed more than a third of your retained value. Accounting doesn’t show it, but the loss is real.
That is why I believe every company should hold Bitcoin on its balance sheet. Not as a speculative move, but as a principle of corporate survival.
Bitcoin doesn’t depend on a central bank, it cannot be confiscated, and its issuance is capped. Those three features make it the only truly hard reserve asset available to companies today. Beyond ideology, it’s simple business logic: if your treasury is in fiat, you depend on policy; if part of it is in Bitcoin, you own a foundation that no one can debase.
Once you introduce Bitcoin into your treasury, you stop thinking in quarterly liquidity and start thinking in antifragile monetary design. Fiat loses value, Bitcoin preserves it. But the next layer of sophistication comes when you collateralize that Bitcoin to generate productive credit, not to speculate, but to grow operations.
Until recently, companies depended on banks for that. Not anymore. There are now regulated platforms such as Ledn, CoinLoans, and Unchained Capital that allow you to obtain fiat or stablecoin credit lines using your corporate Bitcoin as collateral.
And beyond these, there are on-chain credit alternatives built on smart contracts that already operate at lower rates, around 4–5%, through protocols such as Aave or Morpho. These allow you to deploy your Bitcoin into a trustless contract, borrow against it in stablecoins, and use that liquidity for real operations, without touching your BTC or asking permission from any intermediary.
At Sobtree, we apply this model with discipline. We never collateralize more than 25% of our Bitcoin position, and we use those credit lines exclusively to buy new mining machines. The logic is straightforward: we buy Bitcoin, we collateralize a fraction of it, and with that credit we acquire new mining rigs. Those rigs generate new Bitcoin, closing the cycle. In practice, this means we expand our productive base while the original reserve keeps compounding.
Let me give you a simple numerical example. Imagine a company holding 2 BTC on its balance sheet, worth around €120,000 (assuming 60k/BTC). It collateralizes 25% of that value (roughly €30,000) through a 4.5% annual credit line on Aave or Morpho. With those €30,000, the company purchases two new mining machines, each capable of generating 0.07 BTC per year at current difficulty and energy costs.
At the end of the year:
The company has earned 0.14 BTC in mined Bitcoin, worth approximately €8,400 if BTC remains at €60,000.
The interest paid on the credit is €1,350 (4.5% of €30,000).
Net gain: €7,050, or roughly 23.5% ROI on the deployed capital.
If during that same year Bitcoin appreciates by 15%, the underlying 2 BTC reserve grows in value by €18,000. Combined, the company has increased total balance value by over €25,000, while keeping its core reserve intact.
And there’s another layer most people miss: tax efficiency. In many jurisdictions, if a company earns €1,000,000 in profit, it must pay corporate tax on that amount. However, if it reinvests part of that profit into mining equipment, that expense can often be deducted or depreciated, reducing the taxable base while converting fiat into productive hard assets.
This is how a treasury stops decaying in fiat terms and starts working as a self-reinforcing system, an engine that expands capacity while preserving hard reserves.
These are the pillars of a Bitcoin-first treasury architecture:
Hold a base reserve in Bitcoin according to operational liquidity needs
Use BTC-backed credit lines (never exceeding 25%) to finance productive assets
Operate through trusted custody or multisig solutions for governance
Integrate on-chain credit markets (Aave, Morpho) when the company’s structure allows it
Reinvest profits into productive infrastructure such as mining rigs, not speculative trades
This is how a company transitions from being a passive participant in the fiat system to becoming a self-sovereign entitywith its own internal monetary engine.
In future articles I’ll share more concrete details on how we at Sobtree design and execute these loops, from collateral management to mining infrastructure, and how each piece reinforces the treasury’s antifragility over time.
But the essential idea is simple: a company without Bitcoin on its balance sheet is exposed to slow erosion. Fiat wealth fades quietly, while hard reserves endure. Bitcoin is not an investment; it is the spine of sovereign accounting, and the companies that understand this today will be the ones shaping the next financial cycle.