Spot Bitcoin ETFs were supposed to be the main event. Matt Cole thinks they were just the opening act.
The CEO of Strive, the publicly traded Bitcoin treasury firm operating under ticker ASST, is making a bold case that “digital credit,” a category of yield-generating financial products backed by corporate Bitcoin holdings, represents a far larger opportunity than the ETF wave that dominated crypto headlines over the past two years. His reasoning comes down to simple math and a very large number: $300 trillion.
The $300 trillion argument
That figure represents the approximate size of the global credit market. Cole’s thesis is straightforward: if digital credit products manage to capture even 1% of that total addressable market, you’re looking at a $3 trillion opportunity. For context, that would exceed Bitcoin’s entire current market capitalization.
Strive has already launched two products in this category: SATA, a perpetual preferred equity instrument that pays daily dividends and maintains reserves for approximately 20 years, and STRC, another digital credit product designed to outperform direct Bitcoin holdings over time while generating income.
