Approximately 200 publicly traded companies held Bitcoin on their balance sheets as of July 2026, collectively controlling over 1.26 million BTC valued at roughly $79 billion. The model — pioneered by MicroStrategy (now Strategy) starting in 2020 — relied on a simple loop: issue equity or convert...
"The market for digital asset treasury companies had become saturated over the past year." — Kevin McGurn, Interim CEO, Trump Media & Technology Group
Approximately 200 publicly traded companies held Bitcoin on their balance sheets as of July 2026, collectively controlling over 1.26 million BTC valued at roughly $79 billion. The model — pioneered by MicroStrategy (now Strategy) starting in 2020 — relied on a simple loop: issue equity or convertible debt at a premium to net asset value (NAV), buy Bitcoin, report the holdings, and watch the stock price rise. That loop has broken.
Since Bitcoin peaked above $126,000 in September 2025, the token has fallen approximately 50% to the low $60,000s. Combined market capitalization of Bitcoin treasury companies declined from $396 billion to $272 billion — a loss exceeding $100 billion — even as these firms increased aggregate holdings from 953,000 BTC to 1.14 million BTC. Nearly 40% of the top 100 firms now trade below the net asset value of their Bitcoin holdings, according to The Block data. The NAV premium that fueled the entire model has inverted into a discount across much of the sector.
Trump Media's August 7 termination of its $6.42 billion CRO treasury venture with Crypto.com — citing market saturation — marks one of the clearest inflection points. Strategy's sale of 6,948 BTC year-to-date at prices below its $75,385 cost basis, MARA's liquidation of 23,093 BTC ($1.63 billion) in H1 2026, and Bhutan's drawdown of its sovereign stack from 13,000+ BTC to roughly 3,000–4,000 BTC collectively signal that the accumulation phase is over.
The corporate Bitcoin treasury model operates on a reflexive mechanism. A company issues shares or convertible notes at a premium to its Bitcoin NAV, uses proceeds to buy more Bitcoin, and the enlarged stack justifies a higher market capitalization — which then enables the next round of issuance. Strategy executed this cycle for over five years, at peak carrying an mNAV (market-cap-to-Bitcoin-NAV multiple) above 3.0x.
The flywheel requires one condition: the stock must trade above NAV. When Bitcoin traded above $100,000 through late 2025, more than 30 public companies announced treasury strategies modeled on the Strategy template. By the time Bitcoin dropped below $70,000 in Q1 2026, the premium had compressed. By mid-2026, Strategy's own shares traded at approximately 0.7x NAV — a market cap of $43 billion against Bitcoin assets valued at $60 billion.
The discount reflects more than just Bitcoin's price decline. It prices in $8.22 billion in Q2 2026 losses, $12.54 billion in Q1 losses, the company's $4.2 billion in outstanding convertible debt, ongoing dilution risk from at-the-market offerings, and the absence of any operating business capable of generating free cash flow independent of Bitcoin's price.
For smaller imitators without Strategy's capital market access, the math became terminal far sooner.
The following table summarizes major Bitcoin treasury liquidations in H1 2026:
| Entity | BTC Sold | Proceeds | Avg. Sale Price | Purpose | |--------|----------|----------|----------------|---------| | MARA | 23,093 | $1.63B | ~$70,600 | Debt repayment, AI/HPC pivot | | Strategy | 6,948 (YTD) | ~$445M | ~$64,000 | STRC preferred stock buybacks | | Riot Platforms | 3,778 (Q1) | $289.5M | $76,626 | Operational liquidity | | Bhutan (DHI) | ~9,000+ (est.) | $200–240M | Various | Gelephu City development | | Satsuma Technology | 668 | ~$43.5M | ~$65,100 | Full liquidation and delisting | | Bitdeer | 943 | Undisclosed | Various | AI data center pivot | | Genius Group | 84 | $8.5M | Various | Debt repayment; treasury emptied | | K Wave Media | 88 | ~$6M | Various | Debt repayment; treasury emptied |
Strategy's sales are particularly significant. The company sold 1,690 BTC between August 3 and August 9 at an average price of $64,262 — roughly $11,100 below its aggregate cost basis of $75,385 per coin. Every dollar of proceeds went into buybacks of its STRC preferred stock. In May, Strategy also deployed $1.5 billion to repurchase its 2029 convertible notes at roughly a 9% discount to par — choosing debt reduction over Bitcoin accumulation for the first time.
MARA cut 15% of its workforce alongside the BTC sales. The company indicated that selling Bitcoin "could become a recurring element" of its treasury strategy, a statement that would have been unthinkable 12 months prior.
The Financial Accounting Standards Board's ASU 2023-08, effective for fiscal years beginning after December 15, 2024, requires companies to measure crypto assets at fair value with unrealized gains and losses flowing directly through net income. Under the prior impairment-only model, companies recorded losses when Bitcoin declined but could not mark up unrealized gains until sale.
The new standard was initially celebrated as a catalyst for corporate adoption. In a rising market, it allowed companies to report Bitcoin appreciation as income. In a declining market, it produces the opposite: massive net losses that overwhelm operating results.
Strategy reported a $12.54 billion net loss in Q1 2026 and an $8.22 billion loss in Q2, driven almost entirely by Bitcoin markdowns. Trump Media posted $190.4 million in crypto-related markdowns in Q2 alone, contributing to a $238 million quarterly loss. MARA reported a $611 million loss. These are not operating failures in the traditional sense — they are accounting consequences of holding volatile assets under fair-value rules.
The practical effect: quarterly earnings reports now function as leveraged Bitcoin sentiment indicators. Analyst coverage has shifted from evaluating operational fundamentals to modeling Bitcoin price scenarios and their impact on GAAP net income. For companies with minimal non-crypto revenue — which describes most treasury imitators — the earnings statements have become functionally indistinguishable from Bitcoin price charts with a corporate wrapper.
Trump Media & Technology Group terminated its CRO Strategy treasury venture with Crypto.com on August 7, 2026, ending a deal originally announced in August 2025. The venture was structured to create the first and largest publicly traded company focused on the CRO token, with a notional value of $6.42 billion.
The company simultaneously cancelled a related ETF-servicing deal and pulled back from prediction market plans with Crypto.com. Interim CEO Kevin McGurn attributed the decision to market saturation in the digital asset treasury space.
Trump Media's crypto holdings as of July 31: 14,139 BTC (worth roughly $900 million at that date), plus residual CRO tokens. The company recorded $306.69 million in digital asset losses during H1 2026. Beginning August 26, Trump Media gains the right to sell approximately 68.4 million CRO tokens — about 10% of its holdings — over the following six months.
The CRO deal collapse matters beyond Trump Media. It signals that the "treasury company" as an asset class — a stock vehicle whose sole value proposition is holding crypto on behalf of public market investors — has lost its market. More than 30 companies launched such vehicles between mid-2025 and early 2026. Most now trade at discounts to the underlying assets they hold, offering investors worse economics than simply buying the tokens directly.
The Royal Government of Bhutan, operating through sovereign investment arm Druk Holding and Investments (DHI), held more than 13,000 BTC in October 2024 — at that time worth over $1 billion. The stack was accumulated through state-run mining operations powered by Bhutan's hydroelectric infrastructure at near-zero marginal cost.
By mid-2026, Bhutan's remaining holdings had fallen to an estimated 3,000–4,000 BTC. Cumulative 2026 outflows are estimated at $200–240 million, routed through over-the-counter channels to avoid spot market impact. The proceeds are understood to fund the Gelephu Mindfulness City, an economic zone near Bhutan's southern border designed to attract foreign investment.
Bhutan's mining operations have reportedly slowed or halted entirely. For a sovereign entity that produced Bitcoin at near-zero cost, continued selling at $60,000–$70,000 represents a rational realization of sunk hydroelectric investment. But it also removes a high-profile institutional holder from the market's supply-demand equation.
Several former treasury companies have rebranded their exits as strategic pivots to artificial intelligence infrastructure. Bitdeer liquidated 943 BTC to fund AI data centers. MARA directed capital from its $1.63 billion in BTC sales toward AI/HPC expansion. K Wave Media and others have cited AI as the rationale for winding down crypto operations.
The pattern warrants skepticism. Companies that accumulated Bitcoin specifically to serve as treasury vehicles are now claiming expertise in AI infrastructure — a capital-intensive, highly competitive sector dominated by hyperscalers with balance sheets orders of magnitude larger. The pivot often coincides precisely with the point at which the Bitcoin treasury model stopped generating equity premium.
This does not mean every AI pivot lacks merit. MARA's existing data center infrastructure has plausible dual-use applications. But for sub-scale treasury companies with no relevant operational history, the AI narrative serves primarily as a face-saving exit from a failed strategy.
Not all treasury companies are liquidating. Metaplanet continued purchasing Bitcoin in 2026, accumulating 35,102 BTC at an average cost of $107,607 — carrying an unrealized loss of roughly $1.45 billion, or -38.5%. Coinbase maintains significant holdings as part of its exchange operations. Strategy itself, despite selling 6,948 BTC, still holds 840,447 coins.
The sector bifurcation is clear. Companies with capital market access, convertible debt capacity, and sufficient operating revenue to service obligations can endure Bitcoin's drawdown. Companies that entered the space in 2025 on the assumption of perpetual NAV premiums — small-cap vehicles with no operating business, funded entirely by equity issuance — cannot.
In H1 2026, public companies collectively added 166,984 BTC while miners produced only 81,153 BTC. Corporate demand still exceeds new supply by a factor of roughly 2x. But that demand is increasingly concentrated among a small number of large holders willing to absorb continued losses, rather than distributed across a growing field of new entrants.
The corporate Bitcoin treasury model is not dead, but it has been definitively repriced. The 2025 thesis — that any company could issue equity at a premium, buy Bitcoin, and generate shareholder value through the reflexive feedback loop — assumed a permanently expanding NAV multiple. Bitcoin's 50% decline from its September 2025 peak has falsified that assumption for the majority of participants.
What remains is a concentrated sector. Strategy, Metaplanet, and a handful of miners with dual-use infrastructure continue to hold. The rest are selling — to repay debt, fund pivots, or simply return capital to shareholders who can buy Bitcoin directly at lower cost and without corporate overhead.
The FASB fair-value regime ensures that the next Bitcoin recovery, if and when it arrives, will produce equally dramatic positive earnings. The accounting standard is symmetric. But symmetry does not solve the structural problem: without NAV premiums, the treasury company offers investors a worse deal than a spot Bitcoin ETF or direct custody.
The model's survivors will be those with genuine operating businesses that generate value independent of Bitcoin's price. For the treasury-only vehicles, the August 2026 data suggests the unwind is well underway.