Key Takeaways
- Crypto holding companies own subsidiary entities or manage a treasury that contains cryptocurrency assets.
- These firms often enjoy the same benefits as traditional holding companies.
- However, the same tax and compliance requirements also apply.
What Are Crypto Holding Companies?
Crypto holding companies are corporations that manage holdings related to the blockchain sector — generally covering two distinct categories.
The first concerns traditional holding companies that own other crypto firms as subsidiaries. In other words, these are blockchain startup legal entities that are structured to acquire, manage, and sell subsidiaries.
The second category is more novel. It includes companies that hold crypto tokens like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). These companies, often referred to as digital asset treasuries, focus on accumulating and managing their crypto balances.
Both approaches provide similar opportunities in that they can help you expand your reach in the crypto sphere. Here’s how you can benefit.
What Advantages Do Crypto Holding Companies Provide?
Benefits of Operating a Holding Company
Establishing a crypto holding company is challenging due to rapid growth in the sector, a limited number of acquisition targets, and rising crypto asset prices.
But if you’re in a position to create one, you can expect to benefit from:
- Tax benefits, such as tax deferrals, rebates, and exemptions, lower tax rates, and the ability to operate from a favorable tax regime.
- Asset segregation allowing you to hold financial assets or crypto assets with certain entities and isolate risk within those entities.
- Subsidiary separation. With the right crypto company structure, your holding company can manage multiple other firms with isolated risk.
- Combined board oversight, allowing the holding company to govern or control subsidiary crypto companies through a board or shareholder group.
- Improved operations from combining payroll, finance, cybersecurity, legal, and compliance activities across all subsidiaries.
- Internal funding if you redistribute finances between companies.
Seeking Acquisition From a Crypto Holding Company
If you’re a crypto entrepreneur with a small startup and are unable to establish your own holding company, seeking acquisition is another option.
Acquisition by a holding company may provide:
- Access to shared resources, such as funds allocated from other subsidiaries within the holding company, plus non-financial resources like employees, research groups, and crypto sector intelligence.
- Better access to institutional capital when high-status holding companies convince external VCs and angel investors to contribute funding.
- Greater brand recognition. Being associated with a major company can be beneficial due to the fast and competitive nature of the crypto sector.
- Improved operations from sharing payroll, finance systems, cybersecurity, legal, and compliance operations with other subsidiaries in the group.
- Exit opportunities that allow your company to eventually be sold at a higher value as it matures into a recognizable brand.
Leveraging Blockchain Technology
Joining forces with an experienced crypto holding company can also provide broad access to cutting-edge blockchain technology, such as:
- Qualified crypto custodians that provide compliant storage of crypto assets.
- Tokenization that makes your real-world assets transferable on-chain.
- Multi-signature wallets that provide joint access to your company’s cryptocurrency balance (or any asset stored on-chain).
- Private ledgers, a blockchain-adjacent technology suitable for both financial and non-financial applications, including payments, trade settlement, supply chain management, healthcare records, and enterprise data management.
- Smart contracts that automate transactions and business activities.
These blockchain and crypto technologies are available to everyone, not just holding companies and their subsidiaries — but cooperating with a holding company that knows the space can make it easier to leverage these technologies.
Navigating Regulations
You’ll need to maintain a crypto company structure that’s compliant with rules and regulations. These are just a few things that you should consider.
Tax Requirements
Crypto holding companies are subject to many of the same taxation rules as other businesses. That means you’ll need to observe rules around capital gains tax, dividend tax, and corporate income tax — including capital gains tax on crypto that you buy and sell on exchanges and income tax on some crypto payments.
Additionally, you may need to pay income tax on crypto received from staking, mining, airdrops, and other distributions. Check your jurisdiction’s guidance for clarity.
Reporting and Disclosure Obligations
Companies that work with crypto should submit detailed disclosure filings, including information about held assets, capital raises, and risk assessments.
Disclosure requirements are typically set by regulatory bodies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the United States, and other authorities globally.
Reporting obligations are often extremely broad, and your local authorities likely publish guidance specifically related to cryptocurrency activities. Check with the relevant authority for up-to-date guidance and obligations.
Custody Requirements
Crypto companies, including holding companies, are sometimes required to store their token balances with properly licensed, qualified custodians.
These custodians make use of strong security practices that are specific to cryptocurrency. This commonly includes “cold storage” and multi-signature technology, which can prevent loss of funds and unauthorized access to accounts.
Crypto custodians can also help your company satisfy requirements around transparency, auditing, asset segregation, and regulatory compliance.
KYC/AML Monitoring
Companies that perform crypto transactions (and any other type of transaction) should abide by KYC/AML requirements. Though your company likely has obligations in this area, often you’ll simply need to use a compliant payment service.
Exchange Listing Rules
Publicly traded holding companies should be aware of rules set by stock exchanges, which can choose to delist companies that do not satisfy requirements.
This is particularly relevant if your company is purchasing crypto for a treasury strategy with investors’ cash. As of September 2025, Nasdaq is requiring some companies to gain shareholder approval before raising cash for crypto purchases.
Other exchange listing requirements are more general. That means you may need to meet minimum standards around stock value, shareholder count, financial reporting frequency, corporate governance policy, and stock liquidity.
Regional Compliance
Your company should cooperate with local regulations and authorities, such as:
- The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) regime
- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Financial Action Task Force (FATF)
- The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and its various rules
Complying with regional requirements involves obtaining licenses and registrations and abiding by other rules. This isn’t just a requirement: it ensures that your company is reliable and trustworthy for potential investors, partners, and the public.
Use Cases and Real-World Examples
Subsidiary and IP Management
One example of a crypto holding company is Coinbase Global. It owns and operates the popular crypto exchange of the same name, plus subsidiaries for its custody service and several other secondary services and regional platforms.
Coinbase has also acquired numerous crypto startups, including Deribit, a popular crypto options exchange. It has preserved Deribit as a distinct intellectual property (IP) and continues to offer it as a distinct service under its umbrella of products.
Coinbase has acquired over a dozen crypto startups through similar deals and expanded globally, an aggressive strategy enabled by its holding company structure.
VC Structuring
Digital Currency Group (DCG) is another well-known crypto holding company. Its subsidiaries include the asset manager Grayscale and the trading platform Genesis.
DCG additionally manages venture capital (VC) investments, including a broad portfolio of investments in early-stage blockchain and crypto startups.
This strategy has allowed DCG to finance some of the most important crypto companies. In return, it’s benefited from multiple revenue streams and wielded strategic influence over the sector — including through its former management of the popular crypto news outlet Coindesk, which it sold for about $75 million in 2024.
Cryptocurrency Token Holdings
Throughout this article, we mentioned a new type of crypto holding company: digital asset treasuries, which acquire and hold cryptocurrency tokens.
The most notable example is Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy. Over the first five years of its crypto treasury plan, Strategy has acquired nearly 639,000 BTC worth about $75 billion. Its holdings amount to almost 3% of the entire Bitcoin supply!
Another example is Marathon Digital Holdings, which holds substantial Bitcoin that it has earned from its crypto mining business. Elsewhere, Bitminer and Sharplink Gaming maintain two of the largest Ethereum (ETH) treasuries.
Despite differing strategies, each crypto treasury holding company has grown beyond its main operations and built up significant corporate value.
How Payset Can Help
If you operate a crypto company, you’ll probably need to offload funds from your favorite crypto exchange in order to make payments at some point. Payset makes this easy!
We can process incoming transfers from several leading crypto exchanges and platforms including Circle, Kraken, Binance, Crypto.com, Bitstamp, and Coinbase.
This feature is available to customers in most locations, with the exception of the UK — and in most cases transfers can be completed in less than five minutes!
And it’s not just for crypto. No matter what sector you’re part of, we can power your payments. Learn more about how we serve holding companies or get an account today.
