In June I sat down with Charlie Lee at Dutch Blockchain Week and asked him what Litecoin still has to prove. This week I got the other half of that story. Jay File runs Lite Strategy, the NASDAQ-listed company that put Litecoin on its balance sheet as the primary reserve asset, with Lee on its board. I expected a treasury pitch. What I got was a public-company CEO telling me that most of the companies doing what he does are not going to make it.
| What you need to know |
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| 1Roughly 100 digital asset treasury companies launched in about eighteen months. File expects consolidation: the survivors are the ones that treated it as "a serious capital allocation" with "discipline from day one", not "a marketing decision to jump onto this bandwagon to potentially get a stock price lift". |
| 2Why Litecoin and not Bitcoin: 14 years, 100% uptime, cheaper and faster settlement, built for payments. His framing is explicitly not competitive: "It's not here to replace Bitcoinā¦ it's here to work in tandem." |
| 3The buyback logic: Lite Strategy retired about 13% of its shares, funded from treasury operations with no debt, narrowing the discount to net asset value from the low 40% range to roughly 25%. In his words, buying shares at that discount is "the equivalent to acquiring Litecoin below market". |
| 4My read: the discipline is real and the no-debt balance sheet backs it up. The honest asterisk is that funding buybacks by selling Litecoin lifted Litecoin-per-share by only about 1.7%, which is exactly the trade-off worth watching next quarter. |
“It’s not a press release”
The digital asset treasury trade was the most crowded idea in public markets last year. Put a token on the balance sheet, publish the announcement, watch the ticker react. I asked File where that leaves the category now that the novelty has worn off, and he did not soften it.
“There was close to 100 digital asset treasury companies that came out in that last year, year and a half, to the mid of 25. So it was a crazy time period. Anytime you see that kind of a rush, you are going to see some interesting kind of backside events coming from that.”
Jay File, CEO and CFO of Lite Strategy
“Backside events” is the polite version. What he described next is a filter, and it is the most useful thing in the interview for anyone trying to judge these companies from the outside. The survivors, he argues, are the ones where the treasury was a capital allocation decision rather than a communications decision.
“Companies that ultimately are going to survive and thrive are going to be those ones that treated this approach as a serious capital allocation, and have a very built-in discipline from day one. And it wasn’t just some sort of corporate strategy or a market cycle trade that you did to generate a little bit buzz.”
Jay File
Then the line I keep coming back to, from a man whose own company is one of these treasury vehicles: “It’s not a marketing decision to jump onto this bandwagon to potentially get a stock price lift. It’s not a press release, right?” He expects consolidation, and he expects the wash-out to hit the companies chasing several assets at once without the governance to hold any of them through a drawdown. Coming from a CEO with an obvious interest in the category looking healthy, the candour is worth something.
You can watch the full conversation here:
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Here is that moment from the interview, in under a minute:
Why Litecoin and not Bitcoin
This is the question every reader asks first, so I asked it first. Every other treasury company reached for Bitcoin. Lite Strategy reached for the asset that has spent a decade being described as Bitcoin’s smaller sibling. File does not argue with the premise, which is what makes his answer credible.
“There’s no denying Bitcoin obviously is the crypto leader. If you want to call it the gold, it’s the wealth accumulator of kind of a buy-and-hold type strategy. But Litecoin is definitely offering a differentiated investment opportunity into a very sound and secure digital money, with a very proven track record that frankly a lot of other digital assets simply can’t really touch.”
Jay File
The case he makes is infrastructural rather than speculative, and he rattles it off like a man who has given the same answer a hundred times: “It’s been around for 14 years. 100% uptime, no downtime. It’s secure. It’s reliable. It’s scalable. It has lower transaction fees. It’s faster settlement than Bitcoin. And it’s literally been optimized for payments at its core.” What interests him is what has not happened yet. He calls it “latent on-chain value”, a network with real infrastructure that developers have not fully activated, which is a polite way of saying Litecoin has been underused relative to what it can carry.
He was careful about the framing, and the care is deliberate. This is not a Bitcoin-versus-Litecoin pitch.
“And again, it’s not here to replace Bitcoin. I’ve always said it’s here as a complement to Bitcoin. It’s here to work in tandem.”
Jay File
That echoes what Charlie Lee told me in Amsterdam, and the consistency between the founder and the balance sheet built on his asset is not an accident. There is also a commercial argument underneath the technical one. In a market where dozens of companies were buying the same coin, Lite Strategy went somewhere nobody else was standing.
“There’s no other institution that is competing for that space. Lite Strategy is an N of one.”
Jay File
For institutional investors, he says, the conversation is slower than a pitch and closer to education: “It’s not a challenge of convincing anyone overnight. It’s finding the right kind of investors, helping them understand what the process is, how we’re developing the Litecoin ecosystem.” His phrase for the goal is that they are “helping a new category of asset earn its institutional place in portfolios”. Having Lee on the board, he admits, does not hurt: it buys “a little bit more gravitas” in rooms where the asset is unfamiliar.
The buyback: buying Litecoin below market
Here the interview turns into a finance lesson, and it is the segment I would send to anyone who owns a treasury-company share and has never thought carefully about what the discount to net asset value actually means. Lite Strategy’s stock traded well below the value of the Litecoin behind it. That gap is not just a market opinion, File argues. It is a purchase opportunity in your own shares.
“A buyback makes sense when your stock is trading at a meaningful discount to NAV. And buying shares at a discount is basically the equivalent to acquiring Litecoin below market. And so it’s accretive per share when you’re taking a look at holdings for a shareholder, by definition.”
Jay File
The numbers are public and they match what he told me. Lite Strategy repurchased roughly 4.9 million shares for about $5.4 million at an average of $1.11, retiring around 13% of the shares outstanding since December, and it did so without borrowing a cent. As of 17 July the company held 819,070 LTC against 31,882,648 shares. The discount, in his words: “When we started that process it was in the low 40%, and we’ve gotten it into around 25%.”
Now the asterisk, because this is where the story gets more interesting than the press release. The buyback was funded from treasury operations, meaning Litecoin sales and covered call premiums. Selling the reserve asset to shrink the share count is a real trade-off, and as we reported when the numbers landed, Litecoin backing per share rose from 0.02527 to 0.02569, about 1.7%. Retiring 13% of your shares and moving the per-share metric by less than two percent is accretive, exactly as he says, but it is a thin margin. File never claimed otherwise, and to his credit he named the discipline that keeps that trade safe rather than the headline number.
“We’ve made mandates that we’re going to reach for yield in ways that doesn’t introduce any sort of custody risk or counterparty exposure that could jeopardize the core treasury. And I think for us it’s important that we continue to carry no debt. That creates a strong balance sheet and creates that conviction and ability to weather the storm.”
Jay File
That last point deserves emphasis in a sector where several treasury companies have borrowed against their own coins to fund exactly this kind of programme. No debt means no forced seller hiding inside the structure when the asset drops. It is the least glamorous sentence in the interview and probably the most important one.
The handcuffs in Washington
Ask any executive in this category what changes their next two years and the answer is regulation. File thinks the technical work in Washington is largely done and that what remains is the legal certainty to act on it. The SEC’s guidance helped, he says, but guidance is not law: “It’s not enforceable, it’s not legislative.”
“How will that then free up the handcuffs that is perhaps shackling these people that want to deploy capital into this space?”
Jay File
He is careful not to promise a timeline or a magnitude, and when I pushed on whether the recovery would be steep or gradual he declined to guess: “Only time is going to tell on that.” What he will commit to is direction rather than speed. On whether the sector sees a viable fourth quarter, his answer was a flat yes, with the reasoning that the people already in the asset have priced the regulatory outcomes into their planning and are waiting on certainty, not information.
“The measure of success isn’t share price”
I closed by asking for the ten-year version, expecting the usual executive fog. What came back was a single metric and an unusually human admission. Everything the company does, he says, runs through one filter: does this grow Litecoin per share? Not market cap, not headlines, not the daily quote.
“The measure of success isn’t share price on any given day. It’s hard not to look at it. I do it myself. I try and keep it to once in the morning, once at night, and then the glory with Litecoin and crypto is it trades 24/7, right?”
Jay File
Any CEO who tells you he does not watch the ticker is lying, and File simply did not bother with the pretence. What he wants the decade to produce is a company that made Litecoin institutionally legible, “known for a company that serious allocators think of first when they want a regulated, professionally managed access to Litecoin”, plus more Litecoin per share than it started with, compounded. He described the whole sector as younger than my teenager metaphor allowed: “It sometimes feels like we’re a bit of a toddler.”
“If Lite Strategy grows our Litecoin per share consistently, and we continue to operate with integrity and intentional investment, I think we build ultimately something that’s going to outlast any single market up or down.”
Jay File
My take
I have been in this space about twelve years and I have watched a lot of companies discover crypto the week it became convenient. This did not read like that. File spent thirty years in industry before this, mostly biotech and pharma, and he answered the balance-sheet questions the way a CFO does, which he also still is. When I asked about volatility he talked about mandates and counterparty exposure rather than conviction slogans. That is a different register from most of the category.
The open question is not the discipline, it is the arithmetic. A treasury company that funds buybacks by selling its reserve asset is running a narrow trade: it works while the discount to NAV is wide and stops working when it closes. He has taken that discount from roughly 40% to roughly 25%, which is real progress and also means the easy part is behind him. The next test is what the same playbook delivers with less of a gap to harvest, and whether the Litecoin ecosystem work he keeps returning to actually produces the demand he is betting on. I said on the call that I want to do this again in person in six months. That is the conversation I want to have.
Two things to keep in mind while reading any of this. Lite Strategy is a listed company and File is its chief executive, so everything above is his account of his own strategy, offered in an interview rather than audited by us. And nothing here is investment advice: treasury-company shares carry both equity risk and the volatility of the asset behind them, which in a drawdown tend to arrive together.
Frequently asked questions
What is Lite Strategy?
Lite Strategy (NASDAQ: LITS) is the first US-listed public company to adopt Litecoin as its primary treasury reserve asset. It was formerly the biotech company MEI Pharma and rebranded in September 2025. Litecoin creator Charlie Lee sits on its board.
Why did Lite Strategy choose Litecoin instead of Bitcoin?
CEO Jay File points to Litecoin’s 14-year record with 100% uptime, lower transaction fees, faster settlement than Bitcoin and a design optimised for payments. He also notes that no other listed institution is competing for that position, calling the company “an N of one”. He frames Litecoin as a complement to Bitcoin, not a replacement.
How does a buyback increase Litecoin per share?
When the share price trades below the value of the Litecoin backing each share, repurchasing shares retires that claim at a discount, so the remaining shares each represent slightly more Litecoin. Lite Strategy retired about 13% of its shares this way and lifted Litecoin backing per share from 0.02527 to 0.02569, roughly 1.7%. The gain is modest because the programme was funded partly by selling Litecoin.
Does Lite Strategy use debt to buy Litecoin?
No. File states the company carries no debt and funds its programmes from treasury operations, including Litecoin sales and covered call premiums, with mandates against yield strategies that would add custody or counterparty risk to the core treasury.
More conversations like this one: Charlie Lee on Litecoin and the quantum question and RealFi’s John O’Connor on why stablecoin issuers keep your yield. Follow Lite Strategy at @LiteStrategy and on litestrategy.com.
