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.
“When you excluded the money available,” Diego Kolling, Head of Bitcoin Technique at Méliuz, informed CoinDesk on the Blockchain Convention Brasil 2025. “The corporate was price nothing.” That money, roughly R$250 million on the time, was largely parked in authorities bonds. After taxes and inflation, returns had been unfavorable. “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 easy. 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 a lot 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 unique 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 purchasing BTC. It buys bitcoin with the revenue from yield era, 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 keeping 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 via derivatives, with potential future enlargement into different methods, comparable to Lightning or bitcoin-backed debt.
However the motivation stays clear: not hypothesis, however survival. “Bitcoin grew to become the escape hatch,” Kolling stated, “when holding fiat meant melting our treasury quicker than we may construct it.”
