The post The hidden cost of idle capital appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Disclosure: The views and opinions expressed here belong solely to the author and do not represent the views and opinions of crypto.news’ editorial. Institutional Bitcoin (BTC) holders started 2025 with Bitcoin trading around $94,000. By October, they watched it surge to an all-time high of $126,200, a move that validated the macro thesis for digital scarcity and institutional adoption. Corporate treasuries that held through the volatility, miners that resisted selling, and funds that stayed allocated all captured that appreciation on paper. Summary Bitcoin’s 2025 round-trip exposed a hidden tax on institutions: Prices ended flat-to-down, but custody fees quietly turned conviction into negative returns. Idle BTC is now a strategic failure, not a neutral choice: Bitcoin-native yield infrastructure matured in 2025, offering 2–7% APY without wrapping, selling, or adding centralized risk. The next phase is balance-sheet optimization: Institutions and miners that pair BTC exposure with native yield can offset custody drag and generate returns — regardless of price direction. Then they gave it all back. Bitcoin currently trades near $85,000, below where it started the year. Institutions that rode the wave up and down are now sitting on year-to-date returns below zero. But while the price went nowhere, the costs kept accumulating. Qualified custody fees ran between 10 and 50 basis points all year. Yield opportunities sat untapped. The round-trip cost real money. At the scale of the largest corporate holders (600,000+ BTC), the opportunity cost of leaving that capital idle is massive. Across the industry’s ~2 million institutional BTC (held by corporate treasuries, private companies, and governments), aggregate custody costs often ranged from more than $100 million to close to $1 billion. For positions that ended the year flat, those fees represent a pure loss. Had these positions utilized Bitcoin-native yield infrastructure, they could have offset custody costs and generated…

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Filed under: News - @ January 1, 2026 10:04 pm