Bitcoin doesn’t need to become a day-to-day medium of exchange to succeed.

Hal Finney understood this very early. He wrote that Bitcoin transactions might be rare, with most activity happening on higher layers or through intermediaries. Individuals would hold Bitcoin as a reserve asset, while institutions would handle payments and credit on top of it. Bitcoin, in his eyes, functioned as base-layer money, not retail payment rails.

Strategy’s preferred equity products effectively treat Bitcoin as a digital reserve asset. Bitcoin sits at the base, while these credit instruments are built on top. Most users never touch the base layer, just like most people never move physical gold. People forget the credit market for gold was almost 3x larger than the market for gold itself.

Lately I’ve been thinking more about the idea of true transactional digital money.

A product like $STRC is about 5x overcollateralized with Bitcoin, which keeps volatility relatively low, though it isn’t perfect. It doesn’t hold a strict $100 peg well enough to be used as a true transactional asset, but it’s far more stable than holding raw Bitcoin directly.

This is where I think institutions eventually come in. This part is speculative, but it’s easy to imagine Strategy offering institutions like JPMorgan or Morgan Stanley a savings-account-style product with $STRC as the underlying plumbing.

$STRC currently yields around 10.75%, which gives banks plenty of margin. They take deposits, allocate into $STRC, offer customers a high-yield, zero-volatility savings account, and earn the spread. Strategy, in turn, uses those funds to buy more Bitcoin and further overcollateralize the credit instruments built on top.

Digital money doesn’t need high transaction volume at the base layer. It needs credibility, scarcity, and final settlement. Bitcoin provides those properties. Everything else can scale above it.

Bitcoin succeeds not by replacing Visa, but by replacing the monetary foundation those systems sit on.