Strive CEO Matt Cole calls digital credit bigger than ETFs for Bitcoin’s future

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.

Stress-tested in a drawdown

According to Cole, that’s exactly what happened between October 2025 and February 2026, when Bitcoin fell from a peak near $126,000 to around $60,000, a roughly 50% drawdown. During that period, both SATA and STRC reportedly outperformed holding Bitcoin directly. Investors were still collecting yield while Bitcoin holders watched their portfolios get cut in half.

Cole would know something about that world. Before joining Strive as CEO in April 2023, he spent 15 years at CalPERS, the largest public pension fund in the US, where he managed over $70 billion in fixed income.

Building the Bitcoin treasury playbook

Strive completed an all-stock acquisition of Semler Scientific, a transaction that marked one of the first instances of a public Bitcoin treasury firm acquiring another company.

The introduction of perpetual preferred equity instruments like SATA represents another layer of sophistication. These products are designed to appeal to investors who want Bitcoin-linked returns without the full volatility profile of owning the asset directly. Daily dividend payments and multi-decade reserve structures make them look and feel more like traditional fixed-income products.

What this means for investors

The risk profile here is fundamentally different from owning Bitcoin or a Bitcoin ETF. Digital credit products introduce counterparty risk, structural complexity, and dependence on the issuing company’s ability to manage its Bitcoin treasury effectively.

For institutional allocators, a Bitcoin-backed preferred equity instrument with daily dividends and 20-year reserves speaks their language in a way that a spot ETF never quite did. If Cole is right that even a fraction of the global credit market rotates into these products, the implications for Bitcoin’s role in traditional portfolios would be profound, shifting it from a speculative allocation to a foundational component of income-generating strategies.