For a long time, Bitcoin’s investment case was relatively simple.
Buy it. Hold it. Let scarcity and adoption do the rest.
That hasn’t gone away. But as Bitcoin becomes a more established part of investor portfolios, another question is emerging:
What else can Bitcoin do?
We wanted to understand how investors are thinking about that question, particularly in two of Asia’s leading wealth and digital asset markets.
So RootstockCollective commissioned research among 600 Bitcoin investors and investment decision-makers in Singapore and Hong Kong, spanning private investors, family offices, wealth managers and institutional allocators.
We found a market far more interested in productive Bitcoin than current participation would suggest.
The headline numbers are pretty striking.
87.5% of the investors we surveyed want to make their Bitcoin more productive without selling it.
89.8% say they’re likely to allocate Bitcoin or Bitcoin-linked assets to a return-generating strategy within the next 12 months.
And yet only 23.3% currently describe their Bitcoin or Bitcoin-linked assets as actively deployed to generate additional returns.
That leaves a pretty sizable gap between ambition and action.
“Investors in Singapore and Hong Kong are clear that Bitcoin is an asset to hold, but nearly nine out of ten also want it to generate a yield. They are not partial to sticking to just one route, buy-and-hold or active deployment.” – Charlie Hayward, Director of Sales APAC.
It would be easy to put that down to a lack of awareness. But that isn’t really what the research tells us.
98.3% of respondents recognised at least one of the six different routes to putting Bitcoin or Bitcoin-linked assets to work that we showed them.
The issue isn’t simply knowing these opportunities exist.
It’s what investors think they have to give up to access them.
Almost every investor we surveyed, 98%, believes making Bitcoin productive means compromising something.
Security was the most commonly expected compromise, cited by 39.8%, followed by navigating technological complexity at 38% and losing quick access to funds at 36.8%.
There are also some pretty widespread misconceptions about what putting Bitcoin to work actually involves.
64% believe it requires deep technical expertise.
63% believe that any second token connected to Bitcoin infrastructure carries the same risk as a speculative altcoin.
50.2% believe participation means transferring Bitcoin out.
And 46.3% believe every route requires a third-party custodian.
Some of those assumptions aren’t difficult to understand.
Earlier ways of earning a return from Bitcoin often involved moving BTC to a centralized platform, relying on a counterparty, or wrapping and bridging the asset.
But productive Bitcoin infrastructure has evolved.
The problem is that investor perceptions haven’t necessarily kept pace.
One of the findings I found most interesting was just how little experience seems to solve this problem.
81.8% of respondents say they feel confident evaluating the security and risks of productive Bitcoin options themselves.
But when we tested six misconceptions about productive Bitcoin, only 6.8% correctly identified all six as false.
Even more interestingly, the investors who already have their Bitcoin actively deployed held three misconceptions on average.
So did the investors who aren’t deploying it.
As Eleanor Beaumont-Smith, Director at RootstockCollective, puts it:
“Experience alone doesn’t make investors ready. People who already have Bitcoin working for them hold just as many misconceptions as those who are purely buying and holding.”
The investors closest to acting aren’t necessarily the ones who have done it before. They’re the ones who feel able to understand the proposition in front of them: how it is secured, where their assets sit and whether they remain in control.
That matters because the research also suggests these misconceptions aren’t fixed.
When investors are given greater clarity about how productive Bitcoin infrastructure works, their willingness to participate changes significantly.
62.7% say they would hold a second Bitcoin-linked token once they fully understood how it was secured.
And 82.8% would probably or definitely consider actively backing a Bitcoin-secured network if they retained custody of their Bitcoin and weren’t required to sell or trade it.
That tells us something important.
The market may not need to convince investors that their Bitcoin should be doing more.
The appetite is already there.
The bigger job is showing that greater productivity doesn’t necessarily require giving up the qualities that made investors want to hold Bitcoin in the first place.
Security and custody sit at the heart of that.
But they aren’t the only things investors are looking for.
Across the full sample, clear regulatory treatment and retaining full control and custody are effectively tied as the leading confidence drivers, selected by 24.2% and 24% respectively.
Investors also want evidence: a transparent, verifiable onchain track record, security inherited directly from the Bitcoin network and independently audited infrastructure all rank highly.
There isn’t one magic reassurance.
Investors want several layers of it.
Another interesting part of the research is how differently this plays out between Singapore and Hong Kong.
Both markets share the ambition.
But the conditions attached to it aren’t quite the same.
Singapore investors show particularly strong interest in productive Bitcoin.
91.1% want to make their Bitcoin more productive, compared with 84.1% in Hong Kong.
They’re also more confident evaluating security and risk themselves and recognise more of the productive Bitcoin routes we tested.
But that appetite comes with some pretty clear conditions.
29.2% of Singapore investors rank retaining full control and custody among their strongest assurances, compared with 19.1% in Hong Kong.
27.5% point to local presence and regulated counterparties, compared with 17.2% in Hong Kong.
And Singapore investors are considerably more likely to see liquidity as something they might have to compromise.
So this isn’t a market that needs persuading that productive Bitcoin is interesting.
Investors want to know that control, liquidity and local credibility survive participation.
Hong Kong investors approach the question a little differently.
They’re more likely to commit outright. 25.6% say they’re already very willing to hold a Bitcoin-linked second token without further explanation, compared with 18.6% in Singapore.
But the risk-return case has to stack up.
The most commonly cited barrier in Hong Kong is doubt that potential returns justify the risk.
And when we asked what would increase confidence, security inherited directly from the Bitcoin network came out on top.
In other words, Singapore investors appear to be asking:
What do I retain?
Hong Kong investors are more focused on:
What secures this, and is the return worth the risk?
Different questions, but both lead back to the same requirement: productive Bitcoin needs to be understandable.
Another part of this story shouldn’t get lost in the technology.
People still trust people.
89.3% of respondents say a recommendation from a trusted adviser, private banker or local institution would make them more likely to participate.
That is particularly important if productive Bitcoin is going to move beyond early adopters and towards more mainstream private and institutional capital.
But advisers can’t solve the problem by themselves.
Among investors who say a trusted recommendation would make them more likely to participate, 97.8% still expect to compromise something.
An adviser can open the door.
The proposition on the other side still has to stand up to scrutiny.
This is where the research gets particularly interesting for us at RootstockCollective.
We didn’t start by asking investors whether they wanted active backing.
We asked what they wanted from their Bitcoin.
Again and again, they described similar conditions.
Keep the underlying Bitcoin position.
Retain control.
Understand where the security comes from.
Maintain access to capital.
And generate an additional return.
Those requirements start to look a lot like the principles behind active backing.
Active backing means committing a Bitcoin network’s ecosystem token to support the builders and projects growing that network and receiving a share of the rewards those projects earn.
Importantly, that doesn’t mean staking the underlying Bitcoin.
In RootstockCollective’s model, backers stake RIF to receive stRIF and use that backing power to support builders across the Rootstock ecosystem. The underlying Bitcoin position sits outside that mechanism.
Rootstock itself is merge-mined with Bitcoin, meaning Bitcoin miners use the same computational work to secure both networks.
That distinction matters.
If 63% of investors currently assume every second token tied to Bitcoin infrastructure carries the same risk as a speculative altcoin, simply telling them something is “Bitcoin-linked” isn’t enough.
Investors need to ask better questions.
What secures the network?
And:
What stands behind the token and its value?
Those questions tell investors much more than the label attached to a token ever will.
The biggest takeaway from this research isn’t that investors have suddenly stopped believing in holding Bitcoin.
Quite the opposite.
83.7% agree that holding Bitcoin will be enough to capture opportunities in the next phase of the market.
But 88% of those same investors are also interested in putting it to work.
That isn’t really a contradiction.
Investors aren’t necessarily choosing between holding Bitcoin and putting capital to work.
They’re looking for ways to do more while preserving what they already value.
Sascha Goetz, CEO of RootstockCollective, puts it this way:
“Bitcoin has now earned its place in investor portfolios. The question now is how it will bring returns.”
For productive Bitcoin, I think that’s the challenge ahead.
Not creating appetite from scratch.
Not convincing investors to abandon the hold.
But building, and clearly explaining, ways for Bitcoin capital to participate in a wider economy without asking investors to accept compromises they no longer think they should have to make.
That could take Bitcoin beyond the hold.
Productive Bitcoin broadly refers to ways Bitcoin or Bitcoin-linked assets can generate additional returns or participate in economic activity beyond simply holding BTC for price appreciation. Different approaches have very different custody, security and risk models, so “productive Bitcoin” shouldn’t be treated as a single investment structure.
Our research suggests they do. 87.5% of respondents in Singapore and Hong Kong want to make their Bitcoin more productive without selling it. In comparison, 89.8% say they’re likely to allocate Bitcoin or Bitcoin-linked assets to a return-generating strategy within the next 12 months.
The biggest issue appears to be perceived compromise. 98% of respondents believe making Bitcoin productive requires giving something up. Security, technological complexity and access to funds are among the most common expected compromises.
Investors want several layers of assurance. Regulatory clarity, retaining control and custody, a transparent onchain track record, Bitcoin-derived security and independently audited infrastructure all rank among the leading confidence drivers in the research.
Understanding also matters: 62.7% say they would hold a Bitcoin-linked second token once they fully understood how it was secured.
Active backing supports the growth of a Bitcoin-secured network by committing its ecosystem token to builders and projects and receiving a share of the rewards they generate.
On RootstockCollective, users stake RIF to receive stRIF, which can then be used to back builders across the Rootstock ecosystem. It is distinct from staking Bitcoin itself.
RootstockCollective commissioned an online survey of 600 investors and investment decision-makers in Singapore and Hong Kong, conducted by research company Walr in August 2026.
All respondents held Bitcoin or Bitcoin-linked assets personally or on behalf of clients or institutions and influenced investment decisions relating to those holdings. The sample included private investors, family offices, wealth managers and advisers, and institutional allocators.