When Brazilian fintech agency Méliuz (CASH3) reviewed its steadiness sheet in late 2024, it discovered one thing startling: it was worthwhile, debt-free, and rising, but the market had valued its enterprise at zero.
“If you happen to excluded the money available,” Diego Kolling, Head of Bitcoin Technique at Méliuz, instructed CoinDesk on the Blockchain Convention Brasil 2025. “The corporate was value nothing.” That money, roughly R$250 million on the time, was principally parked in authorities bonds. After taxes and inflation, returns had been unfavourable. “We had been being confiscated,” he stated.
So Méliuz did one thing radical for a Brazilian public firm: it pivoted to bitcoin.
The shift, Kolling stated, was surprisingly clean. The corporate’s shareholders overwhelmingly voted in favor of implementing a bitcoin treasury technique when referred to as to take action, with 66% of shareholders taking part — the biggest shareholder turnout within the firm’s historical past.
It did so not by issuing low cost, dollar-denominated debt to purchase BTC — like lots of its friends — however by leveraging share issuance and different methods that now embrace derivatives. Whereas leveraging the debt market is usually a low cost type of financing, he stated, this technique doesn’t translate to rising markets like Brazil, the place benchmark rates of interest hover close to 15% and personal borrowing typically prices greater than 20%, Kolling defined.
“Technique competes with 4% Fed charges,” he added. “We’re coping with 22%.” The maths merely doesn’t work.
Méliuz can also be leaning into a special playbook impressed by Japanese bitcoin treasury agency Metaplanet, which sells cash-secured places to generate returns. Méliuz now leverages the identical technique, promoting choices to earn yield on capital put aside for getting BTC. It buys bitcoin with the revenue from yield technology, whereas sustaining the technique with the principal.
Kolling didn’t reveal the scale of those operations for Méliuz, however made it clear that the corporate is in step with a tough cap of round 20% of BTC holdings being deployed in yield-generating methods, and that the agency began testing these methods with smaller quantities earlier than deploying extra capital.
Méliuz, identified for its cashback and monetary providers platform serving over 30 million registered customers in Brazil, retains 80% of its bitcoin in chilly storage and makes use of solely small parts to generate yield by way of derivatives, with potential future growth into different methods, resembling Lightning or bitcoin-backed debt.
However the motivation stays clear: not hypothesis, however survival. “Bitcoin turned the escape hatch,” Kolling stated, “when holding fiat meant melting our treasury quicker than we may construct it.”