rypto is back in the gutter. Bitcoin is below $70,000, down roughly 50% from its October highs. And the pain is sharpest for a new class of public companies that spent 2025 reinventing themselves as crypto hoarders: the so-called digital asset treasuries, or DATs.
There were more than 200 of these firms, collectively sitting on roughly $150 billion in crypto, at the end of 2025, comprising an entire mini-industry modeled after Michael Saylor’s Strategy, the $44 billion (market cap) bitcoin-buying behemoth that transformed itself from a small forgettable software company into the corporate champion of adding bitcoin to your balance sheet.
But even before the latest leg down, many DATs were already trading at discounts to the market value of their crypto. Now that tokens are sliding again, these stocks are falling faster than the assets they hold, racking up paper losses and making it harder to follow the Saylor playbook of continuous crypto buying.
Data provider Artemis estimates DATs are down more than $20 billion in aggregate. Strategy alone reported an operating loss of $17.4 billion in Q4 2025, and its stock is down nearly 70% over the past six months. BitMine Immersion Technologies, an Ethereum-treasury analogue based in Las Vegas, is sitting on $8.1 billion in unrealized losses, with its stock down a similar 66%.
While these companies have managed to keep their market-to-net-asset-value (mNAV) ratio, indicating a premium/discount to underlying crypto holdings, near or slightly above 1.0, dozens of smaller DATs have fallen to deep discounts, not only making it difficult to raise fresh capital but also calling into question their whole raison d’etre.
Many of these “treasury firms” “simply didn’t have the strategy,” but were really opportunistic trades, says Marius Barnett, chairman of Sui Group Holdings, a digital asset treasury firm focused on the Sui cryptocurrency.
In theory, lower prices should be the perfect setup to buy more bitcoin, ether, solana, whatever your mandate is, at a discount. In reality, a lot of these companies loaded up near the top, didn’t manage cash conservatively, and now don’t have the flexibility to keep buying.
This inevitably leads to selling pressure. If enough DATs unwind their positions, it’s not hard to imagine token prices declining further, leading to more losses.
In one of the recent examples, ETHZilla, a Palm Beach-based ether treasury, has recently sold a portion of its $139 million ETH holdings to buy two aircraft engines for $12.2 million, then leased them to an unnamed major airline for about $90,000 a month, according to the company. But CEO McAndrew Rudisill says the volatility doesn’t bother him. “We’ve been pretty proactive about both staking the ether and managing our exposure and we’ve always talked about tokenizing real world assets. Our focus was always to get to a point where you’re generating revenue and cash flow using the asset, and that’s where we are now.” ETHZilla, which was known as 180 Life Sciences Corp before it caught crypto fever, is also planning to tokenize mortgages for modular homes, where Rudisill claims default rates are low.
oday, many DATs look like screaming bargains given that their underlying crypto would seem to be trading for as little as 13 cents on the dollar. Moreover, many of the larger names, like Strategy and Metaplanet, have avoided pledging their crypto as collateral so they don’t have to sell out their treasuries to cover obligations.
Enticing as the discounts may seem, don’t count on them narrowing anytime soon unless crypto soars again and DAT momentum resumes. Many have predicted a wave of consolidation for corporate crypto holders. But digital asset treasury deals are difficult.
“I think it’s really challenging to do M&As, at least right now,” says Christian Lopez, managing director at Cohen & Company Capital Markets. “One, everyone thinks they’re undervalued. They may or may not be. Theoretically, if I’m trading at, like, 0.8 mNAV and you’re trading at 0.9 mNAV, and you acquire me for 0.85 mNAV, that’s technically accretive for both sides. So on paper it kind of makes sense. But then you start to run into shareholder and governance issues.”
Many speculators stuck in a stock trading at 0.8x mNAV will be reluctant to approve a deal at 0.85x mNAV, especially if liquidation gets them closer to 1.0x. Why sell the company at a discount when simply selling the crypto should bring you to par value?
This is the trap many DATs are now in, says Lopez. They’re down 20%, 30%, 70% in some cases, on the underlying asset with limited cash. And it all comes back to liquidity. Some trade hundreds of millions of dollars a day but plenty are illiquid. And if you don’t have volume, it’s hard to get financing at any price.
Lopez’s investment bank has been trying to pitch companies and investors on convertibles. “One of the things we pitch to some clients is a convertible note that funds today and converts only when they’re trading above 1.0x mNAV,” says Lopez. “That gives the investor downside protection—say a two- to three-year term, with conversion only above that level. It’s technically accretive when it converts, and they use that equity.”
But investors aren’t biting, and neither are crypto treasury managers. “It’s been challenging to get these done because the bid-ask spread on pricing just can’t get there. Investors want a bit more protection and a bit more upside, and boards and management teams are like, ‘Look, we really could use the money,’ but they feel it’s too expensive, especially in this down cycle for crypto.”
Some DATs appear to be pivoting altogether.
Anthony Pompliano’s bitcoin treasury ProCap Financial owns 5,007 bitcoins, worth $343 million but has a market cap of only $214 million. Its Nasdaq-traded shares are down 75% in the last year. Last week, Pompliano announced ProCap would be acquiring his other company, CFO Silvia, a personal finance platform that keeps track of your assets, and pitched the combined entity as the “first publicly traded agentic finance firm” with a mission to “help independent investors make money.”
He insists the deal wasn’t dictated by his sagging market cap or deeply discounted crypto, pointing out that Silvia was started before ProCap, in May 2025, a month before ProCap announced a SPAC merger to become a bitcoin treasury. Given that ProCap Financial is so new, you can’t fault Pompliano for his rush toward the stock market’s latest darling, agentic AI.
For DAT investors, the real test of this down cycle is whether companies like ProCap have a viable plan for capitalizing on their crypto or are merely balance sheet traps. When bitcoin was climbing, the difference didn’t matter much. At $68,000 and falling, it matters a lot.