Decrypt’s Story of the Year 2025: Crypto Treasury Companies Flood Wall Street

Are crypto-buying companies destined to become a Wall Street mainstay, or will they be remembered as simply a fad, reflecting the highs and lows of previous market cycles?

That question has surfaced in recent months, as a long line of companies that collectively raised billions of dollars to build digital assets have seen their stock prices plummet following a series of pivots and mergers earlier this year.

Whether it’s NFTs or meme coins, with every bull run speculation arises, creating periods of hype that inevitably fade. This year, the novelty of crypto treasury firms ran out of steam as several members of the industry’s newest parade became tense, but many argue that their approach to reshaping traditional finance is different.

A number of crypto-buying companies tapping into the public markets this year have styled themselves after Strategy, borrowing elements from the Bitcoin buying pioneer’s playbook to amass everything from Dogecoin to Tron. Yet outliers like GameStop are putting their own spin on the game.

As the year progressed, Strategy adapted to an increasingly crowded field, issuing new types of securities to replenish its namesake stock. Nevertheless, one of the most popular tools became less effective as some of its emerging competitors were ripped away.

In some ways, the future may be uncertain for crypto treasury companies, but amid a supportive regulatory environment, it looks like more will enter the market. Whatever the case, this year can be remembered as the moment when the trend reached its peak and shaped an entirely new class of investments for institutions and individuals to navigate.

Kristen Smith, president of the Solana Policy Institute, shared Declutter that a change in leadership at the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Donald Trump has likely allowed more crypto treasury companies to flourish

Rather than pursuing a time-consuming public offering, many crypto-treasury companies have emerged from reverse mergers, Smith said, noting that the process is subject to SEC approval.

“If you think about it, most of these [crypto treasury firms] created through a reverse takeover,” she said. “The SEC would never have agreed to the creation of these companies under the previous administration.”

Hello mNAV

If hundreds of publicly traded companies start buying Bitcoin at once, how can investors separate the winners from the losers? In essence, the industry’s answer was mNAV.

This informal metric, short for multiple-to-net asset value, has cemented itself as a popular metric for assessing how a company is valued relative to its crypto holdings.

Typically, a company’s mNAV is calculated by dividing its market capitalization by the net value of its crypto holdings, creating a multiple that reflects a premium or a discount. However, some companies, including Strategy, calculate mNAV based on enterprise value rather than market capitalization, which takes into account the company’s debt and available cash.

The multiple has meaning for crypto treasury firms beyond measuring sentiment. It’s also at the heart of one of Strategy’s most popular approaches to raising money for its Bitcoin purchases.

When the mNAV is positive, the company can issue common stock to purchase Bitcoin in a way that increases its holdings per share, which the Strategy tracks as Bitcoin returns. Many young companies have adopted this metric as their north star, with increasing cryptocurrency per share as their primary goal.

The crypto treasury companies that debuted this year came in all shapes and sizes. Some grew cannabis before moving into digital tools or manufacturing medical devices. In fact, the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin in Japan, Metaplanet, has so-called love hotels.

In October, Marty Kendall compared the crowd of Bitcoin-purchasing companies into a ‘gold rush’. In that sense, the company he co-founded was designed to “sell shovels.”

As early-stage companies embraced mNAV, Kendall’s company built dashboards for dozens of them that showed the benchmark, including their performance against Bitcoin, among other things.

Many crypto treasury companies saw mNAVs rise early, but their stock prices eventually fell below the value of their crypto holdings. The strategy fell below the limit in November, limiting the ability to take advantage of a premium that had existed for almost 22 months.

This year, Strategy has issued several types of preferred stock, using dividend-paying products as another way to finance purchases. However, only a few other companies have been able to do this, as a once important source of demand for digital assets has come under pressure.

Different strokes

No one considers Tesla a crypto-treasury company, yet the automaker has 11,500 Bitcoin worth $1 billion on its balance sheet as of early December.

The same can be said for GameStop, the pandemic-era meme and video game store announced a purchase of 4,710 Bitcoin in May. After spending $512 million on the asset, these assets were worth $438 million as of early December.

Despite posing in photos next to Strategy co-founder and executive chairman Michal Saylor, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen said from the start that the company “doesn’t follow anyone else’s strategy” when it comes to stacking Bitcoin.

After raising over a billion dollars through a convertible debit, GameStop hasn’t announced another Bitcoin purchase since, which seems like it’s only getting its feet wet.

Despite lobbying efforts from Matt Cole, CEO of Strive Asset Management, Meta was overwhelming rejected a proposal to start stockpiling Bitcoin in June. Microsoft shareholders voted last year overwhelmingly opposed a similar plan.

Bitcoin was not acquired by “Magnificent Seven” stocks, but according to figures, around 200 publicly traded companies now hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets. Bitcoin treasuries. About two dozen own Ethereum, according to Ethereum Strategic Reserve.

According to Ram Ahluwalia, CEO and co-founder of investment advisor Lumida Wealth, as the growing number of crypto-acquiring companies made it increasingly difficult to differentiate themselves from each other, they sucked oxygen away from established companies.

“There has been a proliferation of this, and it has led to attention fragmentation and liquidity fragmentation,” he said. Declutter. “I think you will see some mergers and acquisitions in the category, but it is still early and we have to see who will play that role.”

In September, Strive said that it acquired Semler Scientific at a valuation of $1.3 billion. At the time, Semler’s market cap had recently fallen below the value of its crypto holdings. Other companies with glitchy mNAVs have decided to do so buy back their shares, or even to sell their crypto.

Beyond Bitcoin

This year it seemed like any company could become a crypto treasury company. That also includes a Tron purchasing company specialized in producing toys and merchandise for amusement parks.

But at one point, getting digital assets onto a company’s balance sheet wasn’t so easy, said Brittany Kaiser, CEO of AlphaTON Capital. And keeping them there was even harder.

In 2023, she served on the board of a company called Lucy Scientific Discovery, which adopted Bitcoin and Ethereum as treasury reserves but later scrapped the plan.

“It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried to get approved,” she recalls. “I didn’t have enough votes to keep it, so the board forced us to sell the BTC and ETH.”

Kaiser is now building a stock of Toncoin at AlphaTON Capital. The cryptocurrency is used for games and transactions on The Open Network, a project that the co-founders of messaging app Telegram quit in 2020 amid regulatory scrutiny. However, in January The Open Network Foundation and Telegram did announced an ‘exclusivity agreement’.

The company has a legacy biotech division that will continue to operate, but Kaiser said AlphaTON is actively developing, incubating and accelerating businesses in the TON and Telegram ecosystems, from DeFi to gaming to enterprise applications.

“From the very beginning, we knew that just purchasing tokens to stake and validate was not something we were interested in,” Kaiser said.

AlphaTON also benefits from staking, that is, by pledging a certain number of tokens from a blockchain network to the network itself, in exchange for rewards. By participating in the process of validating transactions on proof-of-stake networks, many crypto treasury companies have been able to use their assets to generate additional revenue, including those for Ethereum and Solana.

SOL Strategies is focused on deploying as much Solana as possible as the company builds out its own network validators, according to CTO Max Kaplan. So is BitMine Immersion Technologies, the largest corporate holder of Ethereum leaning in prospect of validators.

“The key metric we focus on is delegated engagement,” Kaplan said Declutter. “We’re really focused on the long term here, and that’s where our validator strategy helps.”

Exit strategy

Towards the end of the year, the future seemed to be growing uncertain for a number of crypto-buying companies trying to capitalize on one of the hottest trends on Wall Street.

Because mNAVs showed discounts, the ability to attract financing for many new businesses was limited. Still, some companies have remained steadfast in their efforts to accumulate digital assets, with varying goals including owning some portion of the cryptocurrency supply.

If the hype surrounding crypto treasury companies continues to fade, giants like Strategy may consider lending their Bitcoin. Bloomberg. Still, this route may not be practical for crypto-buying companies that made their first purchase just a few months ago.