As crypto enters uncharted territory in 2026, ReserveOne looks to shake up the crowded DAT market

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Over the past year, the public market has been inundated with digital asset treasuries (DAT) looking to provide traditional investors exposure to singular cryptocurrencies through their company. But not all of these treasury firms are moving to make the most of the opportunities presented by the existing structure. 

“A lot of them are intended to be passive,” Jaime Leverton, CEO of ReserveOne, said on the Talking Tokens podcast recently. “So they don’t put the assets that they hold on their balance sheet to work, and are really just being an accumulation vehicle.”

ReserveOne, a $1 billion digital asset treasury that’s backed by a SPAC, has yet to launch, but is bringing a different angle to DATs with a diversified approach that combines 80% bitcoin holdings with 20% “alternative assets.”

The firm’s approach was inspired by the U.S. government’s Digital Asset Stockpile, which holds Ethereum, Solana, XRP and ADA. “We’re setting up our allocation based on those tokens, free flow market cap and ability to generate yield,” Leverton said.

Today, investors are still looking for exposure, even though bitcoin today is worth far less than the $126,000 peak it touched in October 2025 and the crypto market is trading bearish these days. Many investors don’t want to go to crypto exchanges to get exposure, but would rather go through traditional markets and exchanges, Leverton noted. 

The “pure equity” run from DATs was the strategy of the early days, but there’s a new wave coming where investors are looking for “something similar, in a different format,” Leverton said. “Something a little bit more robust, a little bit more diversified.” 

In the last 12 to 15 months, regulatory clarity and broader support from the administration has sparked a new wave of interest from investors who had probably not wanted to look at the asset class prior to it being “legitimized” by the government or regulators, Leverton noted. “We just saw the markets behave in a way that wasn't what we thought. We had all of these tailwinds.”

As a result, a lot of people are curious about crypto today. Institutional flows continue to come in, ETFs have grown and there’s support coming from the Fed. 

“I think 2026 is going to be a really positive year. We may see from 2026 what we thought we would see from 2025.”

Looking forward, this means the market will be in “new territory,” Leverton said. “The signals before were more clear because you didn’t have all of these competing noises from institutions. So I think we’re in new territory and we don’t have a historical cycle we can lean on now.” 

This points to the significance behind ReserveOne’s diversification strategy, Leverton noted. “You just don’t know which portion of the portfolio is going to be volatile and more volatile any given day, given all of the noise globally.” 

ReserveOne’s team includes seasoned financial industry veterans like Sebastian Bea, a former executive at BlackRock and Coinbase Asset Management. And its board features members like Tether’s co-founder Reeve Collins and Wilbur Ross, the former US Secretary of Commerce.

The crypto venture was announced back in July 2025 and anticipated launching on Nasdaq in Q4, but is still waiting for the US Securities and Exchange Commission to approve its public launch. 

“If you think about the entire package of what we’re offering here, [we’re] offering investors the opportunity to get exposure to the upgrade of the financial system,” Leverton said. “But in one equity.” 

Check out the next section for more details and the full episode.

For today’s episode, I interviewed aime Leverton, CEO of ReserveOne, about building a publicly-traded diversified digital asset reserve inspired by the U.S. Bitcoin Reserve and Digital Asset Stockpile. Jaime explains why she left traditional tech and her role as CEO of Hut 8 to build ReserveOne from the ground up, how the company's 80% Bitcoin and 20% alternative assets strategy differs from single-asset treasury models, and why bridging crypto jargon to traditional finance language is critical for institutional adoption.

She walks through why Bitcoin's historical four-year cycle may have ended, what 2025's surprising sideways price action tells us about 2026, and why ReserveOne raised $1 billion through a SPAC merger. The conversation covers regulatory tailwinds, institutional maturation, breaking crypto's echo chamber, Figure's real-world use cases, truth and provenance in the AI era, and why the next generation expects financial systems as fast as Roblox.

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