It’s not the firms building compliant custody rails, real-time accounting infrastructure, or scalable key management protocols that dominate the public conversation. It’s the ones with the clearest, simplest stories: treasury firms holding bitcoin, ETF issuers promising access, or companies that attach themselves to familiar macro narratives.
They’re not really building more. They’re just easier to explain.
“We hold bitcoin.”
“We provide exposure.”
“We built access for institutions.”
Those lines travel not because they’re profound, but because they’re repeatable.
Meanwhile, many of the most credible infrastructure builders remain practically invisible. They’re serious, regulated, and trusted by insiders: but their brand doesn't show up in the moments that matter: not in public discourse, not in media, not in the minds of buyers or partners.
That’s not a product problem. That’s a credibility problem. And in Bitcoin’s emerging B2B market, where trust is still scarce and reputations are still forming, it matters more than most founders realise.
One of the strange dynamics of Bitcoin is that the products with the most depth are often the least accessible to outsiders. A custody firm solving multi-institution cold storage doesn’t always have a “headline.” A Lightning service provider with serious uptime might have zero social proof. A compliance-grade infrastructure startup might never have published a POV.
Meanwhile, treasury firms or ETF-adjacent equities can say “We hold bitcoin” and gain traction, capital, and narrative dominance, even if they don’t build a single line of code.
The reality is that enterprise and institutional buyers don’t discover new infrastructure through GitHub activity. They form opinions through second-hand signals:
If the answer is no, the deal rarely advances.