Priced at Zero: How Brazil’s Méliuz Turned to Bitcoin to Escape a Treasury Trap

When Brazilian fintech firm Méliuz (CASH3) reviewed its balance sheet in late 2024, it found something startling: it was profitable, debt-free, and growing, yet the market had valued its business at zero.

“If you excluded the cash on hand,” Diego Kolling, Head of Bitcoin Strategy at Méliuz, told CoinDesk at the Blockchain Conference Brasil 2025. “The company was worth nothing.” That cash, roughly R$250 million at the time, was mostly parked in government bonds. After taxes and inflation, returns were negative. “We were being confiscated,” he said.

So Méliuz did something radical for a Brazilian public company: it pivoted to bitcoin.

The shift, Kolling said, was surprisingly smooth. The company’s shareholders overwhelmingly voted in favor of implementing a bitcoin treasury strategy when called to do so, with 66% of shareholders participating — the largest shareholder turnout in the company’s history.

It did so not by issuing cheap, dollar-denominated debt to buy BTC — like many of its peers — but by leveraging share issuance and other strategies that now include derivatives. While leveraging the debt market can be a cheap form of financing, he said, this strategy doesn’t translate to emerging markets like Brazil, where benchmark interest rates hover near 15% and private borrowing often costs more than 20%, Kolling explained.

“Strategy competes with 4% Fed rates,” he added. “We’re dealing with 22%.” The math simply doesn’t work.

Méliuz is also leaning into a different playbook inspired by Japanese bitcoin treasury firm Metaplanet, which sells cash-secured puts to generate returns. Méliuz now leverages the same strategy, selling options to earn yield on capital set aside for buying BTC. It buys bitcoin with the income from yield generation, while maintaining the strategy with the principal.

Kolling did not reveal the size of these operations for Méliuz, but made it clear that the company is in line with a hard cap of around 20% of BTC holdings being deployed in yield-generating strategies, and that the firm started testing these strategies with smaller amounts before deploying more capital.

Méliuz, known for its cashback and financial services platform serving over 30 million registered users in Brazil, keeps 80% of its bitcoin in cold storage and uses only small portions to generate yield through derivatives, with potential future expansion into other strategies, such as Lightning or bitcoin-backed debt.

But the motivation remains clear: not speculation, but survival. “Bitcoin became the escape hatch,” Kolling said, “when holding fiat meant melting our treasury faster than we could build it.”