The idea was simple: buy Bitcoin through a public company instead of directly. It has not gone well.
Digital asset treasury companies — or DATs — are publicly traded firms whose main business is holding cryptocurrency on their balance sheets.
Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) is the biggest, with over 687,000 Bitcoin. Smaller copycats followed, some focused on Ethereum, Solana, XRP, and other tokens. By mid-2025, the number of companies holding Bitcoin this way had grown from around 70 to more than 130.
The pitch to investors: get levered crypto exposure through stocks, inside a regular brokerage account.
Bloomberg reported that the biggest DATs have fallen a median 62% over the past year — far worse than Bitcoin's roughly 40% drop from its October peak.
The problem is a metric called mNAV — market-to-net-asset-value. At their peak, investors were paying $2, $3, even $7 for every $1 of crypto a company held, believing management would compound returns over time.
Now many DATs trade at or below 1x — meaning their stock is worth less than the coins they own. When that happens, companies can't raise money to buy more crypto without diluting shareholders, and the whole flywheel breaks.
Strategy trades around 0.93x mNAV. Smaller names like SharpLink and Metaplanet peers are down 80-90% from peaks.
Galaxy Digital warned in its annual report that five or more DATs may be forced to sell assets, merge, or shut down in 2026 — particularly those holding altcoins or carrying heavy debt loads.
The firms that survive, analysts say, will be ones that generate actual yield from their holdings rather than simply accumulating and waiting.
The premium era is over. What's left is a stress test.