The story of a company’s adoption of Bitcoin is often told as a parade of logos. The new CFO decided to act boldly. The board nods. The Treasury buys the coins. The numbers will go up.
The parade has not been seen for two months. According to BitBo’s financial tracker, the last new company to join the BTC club on its balance sheet was GD Culture Group on September 18th. Since then, this is nothing new, the “New Entities” table just has the same date at the top.
However, this does not mean that there is no corporate demand. It just looks different. Online bidding is dominated by the same group of repeat accumulators, and Strategy is the poster child for tradfi’s Bitcoin thirst.
On November 17th, the company added 8,665 BTC in one go, a reminder that the most stable buyers were already in the pool. The market may not be receptive to new swimmers, but it certainly looks to veteran swimmers for extra laps.
We need to dig deeper into the numbers to understand why the pattern has changed and what it means for the next stage of adoption.
empty entrance ramp
Let’s start with absences.
BitBo’s “Newly Added Financial Entities” log is a rolling register of first-time holders. The text before Sept. 18 was a bullish scrapbook, with small public companies testing the waters, a few private names, and even some municipal experiments.
After the acquisition of GD Culture Group on September 18th, the list will be silent until November 21st. In a market built on momentum, two months of silence cannot be ignored. This lack of activity indicates that onboarding has a steady pace and is currently slow.
So why is there a quiet period? There are several possible culprits.
First, accounting and governance. Even after the transition to fair value accounting in the US, many boards of directors still treat BTC like an important footnote rather than a core financial asset. The comfort of policy templates and auditing takes time to sink in. No amount of keynote speeches will instantly change the wiring of a board’s risk committee.
The second is representation by an agent. Spot Bitcoin ETFs solved a pain point for institutions that wanted Bitcoin exposure without storage or policy overhead. If a board can purchase IBIT or FBTC through the same securities stack that holds a fixed income ETF, the need for raw coins on the balance sheet disappears.
BitBo’s “Latest Changes” feed is now a daily ledger of ETF inventory shuffles, which is great for liquidity but doesn’t add a logo to your corporate treasury wall.
Third is the allocation of attention. This year so far has felt like a choose-your-own adventure between AI capital investment and digital asset policy. But a CFO’s focus is finite, and the “buy BTC” memo tends to be placed lower in the stack when spare cash goes to GPUs or debt repayments.
As a result, new companies stopped coming in and repeat buyers started making headlines. A case in point is Strategy’s acquisition in November. If you value market structure over story, this focus outweighs the lack of a fresh logo. (Bitobo)
Who sells silence?
Now turn to the other side of the ledger. The same BitBo changelog that shows Strategy’s large purchases also shows meaningful divestitures and restructuring executions among miners and small-cap stocks.
HIVE Digital is the most notable example because the rate of change jumps off the page. On September 30th, HIVE reported BTC balances moved from 2,201 to 210, a decrease of 1,991 coins, a drawdown of approximately 90%. HIVE management explained the split. As of September 30th, 210 BTC were not deposited with the Treasury and 1,992 BTC were collateralized.
This means that there is a large stack, but much of it is tied to capital expansion rather than as free liquidity collateral. Although the headline numbers have shrunk, the economic impact has not disappeared. However, the nuances are often overlooked by a quick read of the table.
Looking beyond HIVE reveals more realistic balance sheet options. Argo Blockchain’s BTC line has fallen approximately 82% between snapshots. Cathedra fell about 74%. Miners live in an equation of three variables: hash price, energy cost, and capital availability.
If power is unstable and investors prefer self-funding rather than equity, selling inventory or using it to finance equipment may be a logical choice.
We are also seeing active accumulation by miners. Bitdeer’s entries have shown steady growth through November, while Hut 8’s balances have increased by more than 3,400 BTC between quarter-end snapshots as the company’s consolidation and financial strategy evolves. The headline “miners on sale” is too simplistic. There are certainly places where this is the case, but there are also places where it is not. The spread indicates its cost structure and access to financing.
Why is this lull important?
If new firm entrants do not emerge and repeat whales set the tone, the shape of firm demand changes and concentration increases. Liquidity depends on a small number of buyers and a small number of professional sellers. That’s not inherently bad.
But that means the volatility around announcements becomes more theatrical. When Strategy posts an addition of 8,665 BTC on a low news day, the gaps in the story basically fill in on their own. The quieter the onboarding pipeline, the louder the whales sing.
There is also a supply signal hidden in the miner’s column. Collateralized coins are not the same as ready-to-market coins. HIVE updates are the cleanest example. Because management showed the tally in the records. 210 cases are free of charge and 1,992 cases have been promised.
This is clearly divided between liquidity exposure and financial exposure. Collateralized slices are functionally collateral for capital investment and can be converted back into liquidity inventory at a later date. Until then, it should not be double counted as “saleable”.
Adding the presence of ETFs to the diagram gives us a triangle. ETFs translate demand from corporate financial decisions to portfolio allocation decisions, thereby siphoning some corporate novices into fund units.
Corporate logo boards stop growing, but through the intermediary rails, the pool of addressable buyers gets deeper. The BitBo feed currently looks like a morning newsletter about ETF inventory and miner housekeeping. It’s boring if you want a logo, but it’s a lot of fun if you want to know what the microstructure of the market is like.
What will restart the parade of new corporate finances?
There are some realistic triggers.
Sector clusters often move together, making examples of peers in a particular sector more obvious. Even if one mid-cap software vendor outlines a sleepy and boring BTC financial policy that passes audits with minimal fuss, three more companies will likely follow suit within two quarters.
A stable pricing structure that reduces the perception of headline risk. Paradoxically, meltups can slow adoption because boards are reluctant to buy on the upside. Four to two quarters of range trading after the capitulation could cause BTC to look more like a working capital hedge than a moonshot.
It makes financing cheaper and power supply easier for miners. Lower carry costs mean more inventory to hold and fewer pledges. This will reduce forced sales and direct companies’ share of on-chain supplies into the hands of patients.
None of this requires new regulations or celebrity cooperation, just time and a few common case studies.
big picture
Adopting Bitcoin in a company is never easy. It changes in waves with cycles, cost of capital, and availability of substitutes.
The 2025 version of that rhyme includes ETFs that can easily add exposure without rewriting financial policy, miners that behave more like industrial businesses than mascots, and one publicly traded software company that treats BTC like a second headquarters.
Explaining why there hasn’t been a new logo for the past two months requires a calendar and a basic understanding of how CFOs make decisions. They keep an eye on their peers. They like boring processes. They hate surprises.
The lessons for the reader are practical. Don’t judge a company’s hiring based solely on the number of press releases. Observe who is actually resizing and why. Separates liquid Treasury coins from pledged collateral.
And maybe keep an eye out for whales too. When onboarding is quiet, veterans tend to own the pool. On November 17, one of them swam an additional 8,665 meters.
Whether the next lap belongs to new entrants or the same buyers is a question that determines how to price liquidity at this stage of the market. The table shows when the parade will resume.
