Strive vice president Joe Burnett, per Odaily, argues that altcoins usually provide tokenized exposure to protocol fees or staking economics and are often driven by speculation and limited liquidity. He emphasizes that Bitcoin treasury companies operate differently because owning Bitcoin represents a real balance‑sheet asset rather than a token with speculative value.

Burnett describes a scenario in which Bitcoin climbs faster than a company’s cost of capital, allowing the firm to use dollar‑denominated debt to buy more Bitcoin and lift net asset value per share at a rate that could outpace Bitcoin itself. A premium or discount to NAV, he notes, creates capital‑market tools such as issuing new shares to fund Bitcoin purchases, repurchasing shares when they trade below NAV, and leveraging debt to expand Bitcoin holdings.

These mechanisms can work in concert and do not require Bitcoin to rise for the strategy to be effective. Burnett compares the setup to Bitcoin futures, where futures often trade at a premium to the spot price due to demand for leveraged long exposure.

He adds that the premium itself matters because a larger premium provides more room to increase per‑share Bitcoin holdings, potentially supporting a higher premium and further growth in per‑share holdings. The key question, he says, is not whether a premium should exist but how large it should be.