As 2026 progresses, the Bitcoin and Digital Asset landscape continues to evolve rapidly amid regulatory changes, shifting market structure and fundamental developments in the security and software environment driven by advances in artificial intelligence. While the pace of change continues to accelerate, our team remains focused on executing its long-term strategy.
While regular adjustments are necessary, we believe the moat is not built through hype chasing or constant reaction to short-term narratives, but through disciplined execution against long-term goals – turning long-term vision into reality, piece by piece.
From the launch of BitcoinVN (formerly known as “Bitcoin Vietnam”) as Vietnam’s first retail-facing Bitcoin exchange service back in 2014, to the diversified group that BVN Group represents today, with operational activities and partnerships across many areas of the Bitcoin & Digital Asset space, we have – while certainly collecting our battle scars along the way – endured and ultimately persevered on our path to building one of Southeast Asia’s leading Bitcoin-centric firms.
As part of our strategy, we have for some time also begun making selected early-stage investments into the sector – to be the partner and supporter in the early stages that we wish we had in our own early days.
In this wider context, we are glad to announce that, based on our positive working experience with the team, we have selected another firm to join forces with through a strategic equity investment:
Flowrate.
What is Flowrate?
Flowrate is tackling and solving a two-fold problem in one go:
On the one hand, institutional capital increasingly seeks ways to generate productive Bitcoin-denominated yield on Bitcoin held on corporate and institutional balance sheets.
On the other hand, Bitcoin’s primary payment layer – the Lightning Network – requires further capital allocation and sophisticated operational management to reduce friction, lower payment failures and improve reliability as transaction volumes and institutional usage scale.
Making Bitcoin work better at the payment layer increases the value of the network as a whole.
Bringing both sides together requires a team with deep technical and financial expertise: understanding Lightning Network topology, high-stakes cybersecurity, institutional Digital Asset custody, institutional-grade security architecture and risk management – while also understanding capital markets, corporate treasury operations and corporate finance.
At a high level, Flowrate is focused on helping institutional capital turn Bitcoin holdings from passive balance-sheet exposure into productive infrastructure – by capturing yield from Lightning Network liquidity flows.
The underlying thesis is straightforward but potentially far-reaching:
As more companies and institutions hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets – whether as dedicated Bitcoin treasury vehicles, operating companies with Bitcoin reserves, funds, family offices or other long-term holders – the question increasingly shifts from simple exposure to productive deployment. Lightning infrastructure introduces the possibility of generating Bitcoin-denominated operational income on underlying BTC holdings without selling principal, issuing equity or introducing traditional custodial counterparty exposure. In this framework, Flowrate acts as a specialist operator focused on enabling institutions to access and manage this emerging category of Lightning-native yield.
To use the common analogy of Bitcoin as “Digital Gold”:
Gold has often been criticised by traditional finance circles as unproductive capital – an asset sitting on the balance sheet, doing nothing. In many corporate treasury contexts, the same criticism can be applied to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin can serve as insurance, as a strategic reserve asset, and as capital held for periods where no better deployment opportunity exists. But unlike gold, Bitcoin can also be deployed directly into its own payment infrastructure.
Through Lightning Network liquidity operations, Bitcoin can be put – natively – to productive use: improving the reliability and capacity of Bitcoin’s payment layer, while generating Bitcoin-denominated yield for the capital owner.
In simple terms, it is the difference between holding “Digital Gold” passively – and deploying it into infrastructure that makes the Bitcoin network more useful, while receiving more Bitcoin in return.
Yet imagine if a gold holder could deploy part of their gold reserves into industrial use cases which benefit from the wider availability of gold – and which make the economy function – for example in precision electronics, industrial machinery or advanced manufacturing, and in return receive more gold from the economic value created by making those systems work better.
The physical world places severe constraints on this type of concept: deploying reserve assets as productive “liquidity” to improve operational efficiency is difficult, capital-intensive and constrained by physical realities.
On the digital side of the divide, however, Bitcoin introduces a different possibility. Through Lightning Network liquidity operations, these types of opportunities can be captured in a natively digital environment – without many of the constraints imposed by the physical world.
The impact for the Lightning Network
The initial reaction from some Bitcoin-native circles to institutional-scale capital entering Lightning Network liquidity provision is not always enthusiastic.
In the early years, earning yield by providing Lightning liquidity through routing nodes was still largely a game for passionate hobbyists with some disposable Bitcoin to deploy. That era is coming to an end fast.
Increasingly, Bitcoin-native firms with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to deploy are entering the space. Their goal is straightforward: more efficient routing, fewer payment failures and systematic yield capture.
For small-scale operators, running a routing node purely for the sake of earning yield is no longer a very viable undertaking.
If you enjoy the learning experience, want to provide a service to your local or otherwise aligned community, or simply want to run your own node for private Bitcoin payments – sure, go ahead. That use case is not going away and may actually benefit from the broader increase in Lightning Network reliability, better software solutions for end users and improved network UX over time.
Purely financially, however, it is not worthwhile.
In that regard, the development is not too different from what we have seen in Bitcoin mining. What started as a hobbyist activity eventually attracted specialized firms, professional capital and industrial-scale infrastructure. Today, it is no longer realistic to enter Bitcoin mining with the expectation of competing profitably against industrial or nation-state level operators on neutral ground.
Lightning liquidity will likely develop in a similar K-shaped way. Large professional operators can improve the network at scale and capture institutional yield opportunities. At the same time, smaller users can still run nodes for sovereignty, local efficient utilization of resources, learning and niche use cases.
If you put in the work, your family, your local community – and ultimately the Bitcoin network itself – can still benefit. That is part of the beauty of Bitcoin as a permissionless system.
Nobody is coming to save you. Sitting on the sidelines and complaining about inevitable trends does nothing to improve your situation – it only squanders your most valuable resources: time and mental energy. Adapting to changing realities and making productive use of the opportunities available, however, usually does.
The group likely to be squeezed is not the ordinary Bitcoin user, but the inefficient amateur-level commercial operator trying to compete on a borderless global market without a clear edge.
Why Bitcoin / Lightning?
As already demonstrated through our previous commitments to various firms, operators and solution providers in the Lightning ecosystem, we remain structurally bullish on the Lightning Network.
Yes, we are well aware of its limitations and ongoing technical challenges. After all, we operate one of the largest routing nodes in Southeast Asia and have been accepting Lightning payments through our Instant Swap service for several years now.
But every system involves trade-offs, and perfect solutions do not exist.
Some critics simply do not know better. Others have alternative products to promote. Still others seem to enjoy lamenting every imperfection. Yet when judged against the real-world constraints we face, Lightning remains something remarkable: a functioning technical miracle.
You could argue that we are “talking our book” – and that would be fair. But we are also putting our own capital behind convictions formed through direct experience rather than second-hand theory. For more than a decade, we have operated “in the trenches”, watching countless proposed solutions emerge and, more often than not, fail – oftentimes predictably, sometimes less so.
Yes, not everyone in the world will become a Lightning user, and yes, even fewer will go through the hassle of running their own node. But that also does not matter.
What matters is that you can opt in – or, if you prefer, opt out of the legacy system – when you need it, on your own terms.
From a global perspective, we believe the Lightning Network provides a highly valuable service: near-instant settlement combined with significantly improved payment privacy. It reduces the publicly visible financial footprint that can make individuals attractive targets for criminals seeking to identify, profile or exploit them.
In the age of AI, threat actors can increasingly assemble detailed intelligence on potential targets using tools and resources that would have required a well-funded intelligence operation only a decade ago.
As a result, the risk profile – and the defensive posture required – of many Bitcoin holders has changed dramatically. The current wave of targeted violent crime against cryptocurrency holders in parts of Western Europe may prove to be the beginning of a trend rather than the end of one.
In our view, the combination of Bitcoin’s transparent and publicly auditable base layer for long-term savings, together with the speed, efficiency and privacy of the Lightning Network for everyday payments, represents the strongest solution currently available to address these challenges.
Or put differently:
While individual tools may outperform Bitcoin and Lightning in specific areas, no alternative offers a more compelling overall balance of security, transparency, sovereignty, accessibility and privacy when judged against the real-world constraints faced by both businesses and consumers.
Perfection does not exist. But given the trade-offs involved, Bitcoin and Lightning remain, in our view, the most practical and mature combination currently available.
Compared to its early years, the Lightning Network has become vastly more reliable. Unless you are purchasing real estate or supercars with Bitcoin – the former potentially a sound investment if you plan to raise a large family, the latter perhaps a more debatable choice – the user experience today is dramatically better than it was just a few years ago.
It is the result of thousands of contributors across protocol development, application design, infrastructure operations and business adoption who, over the past decade, each played a part in turning an ambitious idea into a functioning global network.
Why Flowrate?
Similar to our previous “bets”, the decision was based not only on the general identified opportunity and market niche, but also on our extensive first-hand experience with the underlying technology.
This practical operating experience, accumulated over many years, enables us to see problems in our own daily operating environment rather than through second-hand, carefully curated “shaped narratives”.
As such, the general idea was quick for us to grasp.
We know what we are talking about in this sector – and from that follows that we also understand what you are talking about.
What Flowrate essentially proposes is, compared to the early days of rather “reckless” home-brew node setups (not something you would want to entrust any meaningful amount of Bitcoin to – although many of the more enthusiastic Bitcoiners did exactly that in their desire to help bootstrap the network) and the current generation of more professional, but in their eyes – and reasonably so – still insufficient security assumptions, the “spaceship” of Lightning node security.
A comparatively capital- and resource-intensive node setup built with best-in-class security in mind, rather than merely being “good enough” and avoiding the most obvious pitfalls – which still dominates much of the industry today.
For the target audience in mind – treasuries of large corporations, family offices and publicly traded Bitcoin accumulation vehicles – you simply cannot skimp on security.
If you want these organizations to feel comfortable allocating part of their treasury to Bitcoin, and then deploying part of it productively as liquidity on the Lightning Network to capture yield, the infrastructure must be built with a security-first engineering mindset.
The “Swiss Mountain Gold Vault” equivalent for the Lightning Network, essentially.
We believe that the core founding team, Dave and Rene, have the capability to pull this challenge off. Their long-standing involvement in the Bitcoin ecosystem, combined with extensive experience in senior software engineering and cybersecurity for large multinational corporations in Europe, is a rare mix – but one that we believe is exactly what is needed to help bridge the Lightning ecosystem into its next phase.
While – expectedly – the development and go-to-market cycle is a long one, in our conversations with the team we also came away with a clear understanding of their long-term outlook on both the market and the solutions required – a view which we share for the most part internally.
None of us is betting to “cash in on the next hype cycle”. We are looking to build the infrastructure that will underpin part of the required solution set for the next one to two decades.
If we – and Flowrate – are right about where the market is ultimately heading, starting to build these solutions now will provide a tremendous moat of expertise and hardened infrastructure once “the market wakes up”.
As touched upon in our previous publications:
This type of highly security-sensitive project is also not something you can just “vibe code”.
This is not a small random app that helps you or some niche customer base do things easier or faster. It is security-first institutional infrastructure that requires years of expertise in key management, physical hardware separation and the architectural setup required to secure tens to hundreds of millions in Bitcoin capital that we expect to find its way onto the Lightning Network over the long term via strategic liquidity deployments.
The virtuous adoption loop
“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome” – as one of the world’s most successful capital allocators of the 20th century, Charlie Munger, succinctly phrased it.
While Bitcoiners have traditionally been highly skeptical of corporations and centralized power structures – often for good reason, given that the centralized capture of the global monetary system was one of the very reasons the Bitcoin idea emerged as a countermeasure and gained rapid mindshare in the first place – we are now almost two decades into the Bitcoin experiment.
The corporations have arrived. And through their expertise, capital and powerful toolsets in financial markets as well as the regulatory sector, they have secured their front-row seats at the table of “Bitcoin the asset class”.
To the surprise of no one with a firm understanding of reality.
That is nothing to despair about, as long as Bitcoin itself remains a permissionless system that people can use – or opt out into – whenever they deem it beneficial for their personal situation.
You will not stop corporations from “coming in on a good game”. Bitcoin is simply too big to ignore now. It is no longer the laughed-about “tiny toy” that was not worth the time and attention of the big boys on Wall Street and elsewhere.
We also do not believe that “mass adoption” – in the sense of everyone in the world adopting Bitcoin at the protocol level – will arrive within any reasonable timeframe, or perhaps ever.
What we do believe is that moving global adoption from, for example, 1% to 2% can already make a massive difference to the fundamental strength of the Bitcoin network.
Our focus is therefore on “the second percent” rather than the 99%: those who are already close to adopting Bitcoin and have a genuine need, but where current friction and hurdles still prevent them from embracing it fully.
And to close the loop:
Once larger institutions have “a stake” in the Lightning economy, they will – in order to keep yield reasonably high – have an incentive to further drive adoption of the Lightning Network for more and more end users.
After all, Lightning Network yield is generated by end users paying a small fee for the benefit of fast and private transactions on the network. If the number of users and transactions remains stagnant while more capital gets deployed onto the network, yield will fall accordingly.
The only way to counteract this natural margin compression is by making more people able and willing to interact with the network. At that point, stakeholders in the network will have a natural incentive to foster and support initiatives that drive global Lightning adoption.
In short, what Flowrate essentially does is allow these larger institutional players to become confident enough to deploy significant capital onto the Lightning Network in the first place – which then drives their self-interest in supporting the growth of global Lightning adoption in order to stabilize yield rates over the longer term.
We believe that this cycle of adoption – if played well – will ultimately benefit the wider Bitcoin and Lightning ecosystem, the proverbial rising tide that lifts all boats, provided the right pieces of the puzzle are moved into the right place at the right time.
And we have the firm belief that Flowrate is one of those crucial pieces of the puzzle at the current stage.
