Announcing: Acropolis
Acropolis is building the first comprehensive treasury solution for the Bitcoin age, with a foundational focus on custody, advisory, and ancillary services.
Why Bitcoin
Bitcoin is a transformative force reshaping the future of finance and business. Due to its unique store-of-value properties, Bitcoin is the ideal treasury reserve asset, and implementing Bitcoin into a treasury strategy is the consummate way to strengthen a company of any size.
Bitcoin has been the best-performing asset class since 2011, adoption metrics are accelerating, and the recent success of the ETFs showcases the demand from traditional finance. That said, we are still early in the potential valuation of Bitcoin and most have yet to take advantage of Bitcoin’s unique properties, as both a store-of-value and technology layer.
Outperforming Bitcoin through traditional business activities will be exceedingly challenging. Integrating Bitcoin into treasury management has the natural effect of promoting long-term decision making. This shift in treasury strategy can play a foundational role in transforming the culture of a business, creating a more capital-efficient, disciplined, and resilient organization.
Embracing the decentralized and deflationary nature of Bitcoin will continue to reward early adopters. As central banks are forced to debase their fiat currencies, many will need to seek refuge in an immutable form of money that operates on a decentralized network. Businesses of all maturity levels require Bitcoin to address the challenge of preserving excess productivity and energy. Conventional methods such as share buybacks, short-term cash holdings, or dividends only scratch the surface and don't offer a solution to the debasement issue faced by businesses.
Why Acropolis
Our offering is built on three pillars: (1) Custody (2) Advisory (3) Ancillary Services.
(1) Custody
Multi-Institution Custody (MIC) represents a step-function improvement over traditional custodial models in the Bitcoin space, and a logical evolution of custodial standards as Bitcoin scales to the masses. MIC leverages the native properties of the Bitcoin protocol, namely multi-sig, to distribute counterparty risk and eliminate single points of failure.
As Bitcoin adoption gradually spreads to every company, institutions will still need to play a critical role in safely storing the asset. There is now a way to do so in a trust-minimized fashion that honors the distributed ethos of the protocol and upholds the interests of end users. The power of this model is two-fold — mitigate single-third-party points of failure and reduce personal attack surface/technical burden — both of which have historically plagued the industry.
MIC solves this by leveraging a 2-of-3 multisig (multi-signature) quorum to secure Bitcoin. In this arrangement, three separate institutional entities — Onramp, BitGo, and Coincover — each hold one private key, and any two of these three keys are required to effect the movement of funds. The game theory underpinning the 2-of-3 multisig quorum further strengthens the system against potential threats, resulting in a robust solution built on redundancy. Three institutions work together to manage private keys and facilitate transactions, all while avoiding unilateral control. End users can always audit their funds onchain and withdraw assets in-kind if they choose.
(2) Advisory
Bitcoin Strategy Officer — a new role that will continue to grow in importance and necessity. There is a significant shortage of hirable talent for businesses of all sizes to fulfill the role of Bitcoin Strategy Officer. Acropolis closes this gap by allowing companies to outsource this critical function. This eliminates the pain point of:
Enterprises hiring unqualified individuals due to lack of options
2. Small & Mid-market companies prematurely hiring full-time resources
The financial position of individual companies varies greatly, whether based on size, age, industry, cyclicality, or level of success. Likewise, the appropriate Bitcoin accumulation strategy will vary greatly from business to business. We live during a time in society where nuance is often missing from conversation, and at times this enters Bitcoin-related discourse. Reality is that a great degree of personal preference is involved in determining a Bitcoin accumulation strategy, and many different factors and probabilities must be weighed.
Acropolis is not in the business of making specific buy / sell recommendations, and Acropolis does not make decisions on behalf of companies. Rather, we arm decision makers with the relevant education and historical information needed to create an appropriate and sustainable accumulation plan.
The Acropolis Bitcoin Treasury Playbook is an open-sourced high-level guide for entities of all sizes that look to fortify its balance sheet and strengthen its future outlook. The accumulation strategies covered in the playbook include a one-time buy and hold, dollar-cost averaging, periodic purchases, and utilization of capital markets. The Acropolis Bitcoin Treasury Playbook is a starting point for businesses to consider accumulation strategies, purchasing, custody, insurance, accounting, and a treasury reserve policy. The Playbook can be found on our website, acropolistreasury.com.
(3) Ancillary Services
The treasury function of a business serves the critical role of managing financial resources and risks. Successful management of a treasury is twofold:
Manage the day-to-day operations and obligations
Develop and execute the long-term financial strategy
It’s critical to not cause a major disruption to one or both of these necessary functions when integrating Bitcoin into a treasury strategy. This is top of mind in the design of the comprehensive Acropolis solution.
Accounts have access to fundamental Bitcoin functionality to facilitate treasury operations:
Buy / sell
Deposit / withdrawal
Month-end reporting
The ongoing development of the Acropolis solution will cover all facets of the treasury function:
Payments integration — incorporate best-in-class infrastructure into the experience
Cross-border payments — benefit from Bitcoin’s unique borderless capabilities
Remittances — utilize the Bitcoin network’s low transaction cost
Ecommerce integration — link your online store activity
Point-of-sale (POS) integration — enable automatic convertibility
Bookkeeping — record detailed general ledger records
Bank integration — view information of other financial accounts
Forecasting — maintain liquidity to ensure current obligations are met
Payroll — offer compensation packages that include salaries or bonuses in Bitcoin
Accounts payable / receivable — pay and receive bills in real-time as value is exchanged
Rewards — motivate loyal customers with the world’s scarcest asset
Escrow — offer intermediary services with Bitcoin’s transformative settlement properties
Bitcoin’s transformative properties will disrupt the traditional treasury function in ways that cannot be fully known at present. Acropolis is building the comprehensive solution to maximize this new frontier.
Why Now
We believe that every business will hold Bitcoin, and Acropolis is pulling this future into the present. Bitcoin is the ideal treasury reserve asset due to its unique store-of-value properties, and implementing Bitcoin into a treasury strategy is the consummate way to strengthen a company of any size.
Currently, few businesses have developed the necessary conviction and alignment to hold Bitcoin. However, more recently the corporate adoption of Bitcoin has accelerated. This comes at a time when US Treasuries, the longstanding global reserve asset, are coming into question as the de facto solution.
A Bitcoin purchased or earned today will be worth more in the future. The appreciating value of Bitcoin will drive increased enterprise value. It will become clear to all in the future, however the early adopters will gain most.
Outperforming Bitcoin through traditional business activities will be exceedingly challenging. As healthy behavior, or means of survival, companies will need to integrate Bitcoin into treasury management, strategic investments, and service offerings. Acropolis is building the comprehensive Bitcoin solution for businesses to thrive during this age of perpetual monetary debasement and disruptive technological advancement.