Corporate buying stirs debate over Bitcoin’s long-term decentralization

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Corporate Bitcoin holdings proceed to climb, but treasury executives reason the inclination is strengthening, not weakening, decentralization crossed the network.

Despite expanding concerns astir concentrated Bitcoin (BTC) ownership, emerging firm treasury firms and caller organization players are contributing to broader organisation crossed the ecosystem, according to respective executives speaking astatine Bitcoin Amsterdam 2025.

“At the extremity of the day, what we are doing is truly decentralizing Bitcoin. It doesn’t look similar that, but it is the lawsuit done the request that we supply successful the market,” said Alexander Laizet, committee manager of Bitcoin strategy astatine Capital B.

Laizet said much banks offering Bitcoin custody options are giving individuals and corporations caller avenues for retention and reducing single-point dependence connected a tiny acceptable of custodians.

Corporations amass astir 7% of the full Bitcoin supply

Corporations and Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are softly amassing the Bitcoin supply, progressively centralizing the organisation of the world’s archetypal cryptocurrency.

Corporate participants person already amassed 6.7% of the full Bitcoin supply, including 4.73% done nationalist companies and 2.03% done backstage companies, according to treasury information supplier bitbo.io

Spot Bitcoin ETFs person besides accumulated astir 7.3% of the Bitcoin supply, becoming the largest conception of holders successful little than 2 years since their debut successful January 2024.

The increasing centralized holdings are not an “immediate threat” for Bitcoin, arsenic its “economic ownership is inactive dispersed crossed galore underlying investors — not a azygous actor,” Nicolai Sondergaard, probe expert astatine crypto quality level Nansen, told Cointelegraph.

“It doesn’t alteration Bitcoin’s cardinal properties. The web remains decentralized adjacent if custody becomes much centralized.”

While this doesn’t contiguous an “Achilles heel” for Bitcoin, it highlights that ample custodial players whitethorn person “more power implicit liquidity and marketplace behaviour” arsenic their BTC holdings proceed to grow, helium added.

Still, immoderate manufacture watchers are increasing acrophobic astir Bitcoin’s expanding organization adoption arsenic corporate crypto treasuries surpassed $100 cardinal successful integer plus holdings successful August.

Bitcoin’s increasing corporate attraction whitethorn contiguous a caller centralized constituent of vulnerability, mounting BTC connected the aforesaid “nationalization path” arsenic golden successful 1971, according to crypto expert Willy Woo.

“If the US dollar is structurally getting anemic and China is coming in, it’s a just constituent that the US mightiness bash an connection to each the treasury companies and centralize wherever it could beryllium past enactment into a integer form, not make a caller golden standard,” Woo said during a sheet treatment astatine Baltic Honeybadger 2025, adding:

“You could past rug it similar happened successful 1971. And it’s each centralized astir the integer Bitcoin. The full past repeats again backmost to the beginning.”

In 1971, US President Richard Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system, suspending the dollar’s convertibility into golden and abandoning the fixed $35-per-ounce rate, efficaciously ending the golden standard.