When the asset is rising, a particular type of financial concept appears brilliant; when it isn’t, it appears to be a slow-motion error. The Bitcoin treasury strategy is starting to feel like one of those concepts; it’s not quite broken, but it’s straining in ways that were always foreseeable but still managed to surprise people. If you walk into the offices of any mid-tier business that added Bitcoin to its balance sheet in the second half of 2025, you’ll see that the quarterly figures present an unsettling picture.
This was initiated by Michael Saylor. There is no question about that part. When Strategy, which was still known as MicroStrategy at the time, started converting its corporate treasury into Bitcoin instead of dollars in 2020, the idea was viewed as strange and possibly dangerous. Boardrooms did not celebrate a software company with mediocre revenue deciding that Bitcoin was a better reserve asset. Bitcoin then increased. Then it rose even higher. By the middle of 2025, Strategy had more than 500,000 Bitcoin, and Saylor was being regarded more as a prophet who had just been correct before everyone else than as a CFO placing a wager. The floodgates were opened by that perception.
| Topic | Details |
|---|---|
| Model Origin | Michael Saylor’s Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) pioneered corporate Bitcoin treasury strategy in 2020, initially framed as an inflation hedge |
| Strategy’s BTC Holdings | 712,647 BTC at an average cost of ~$76,037 per coin — roughly $1.76 billion in unrealized profit as of early February 2026 |
| Total Corporate Adopters | Over 250 organizations — including public companies, private firms, ETFs, and pension funds — now hold BTC on their balance sheets |
| Metaplanet (Japan) | 35,102 BTC held at an average cost of $107,716 per coin — approximately $1.03 billion underwater at $78,500 spot price |
| Trump Media | 11,542 BTC at $118,529 average cost — roughly $462 million in unrealized losses; among the most exposed late-cycle buyers |
| Tesla | 11,509 BTC at $33,539 average cost — approximately $517 million in profit, benefiting from early entry |
| Coinbase | 14,548 BTC at $71,465 average — roughly $102 million in the green; modest buffer but present |
| Core Risk | mNAV (multiple of net asset value) premium collapse — when stock price falls toward or below BTC reserves value, equity raises become punitive and a funding death spiral can begin |
| Nakamoto (NAKA) | Stock collapsed nearly 99% from its May 2025 peak — one of the clearest early casualties of the model’s limits under pressure |
| Michael Saylor’s Taxonomy | Three-tier model: Pure Play Issuers (Strategy, Metaplanet), Hybrid Operators, and Dabblers — each carrying distinct risk profiles and expected outcomes |
By the time the imitators arrived — and they arrived in enormous numbers, over 250 organizations across public markets, private firms, pension funds, and ETFs now holding BTC on their balance sheets — the playbook had been simplified into something almost dangerously clean: raise capital, buy Bitcoin, wait. There is a cap on the supply. Fiat continues to be printed. Time takes care of the rest. In the long run, the thesis might still be true. The problem is that the very long run requires surviving the medium term, and the medium term, right now, involves a lot of red numbers on a lot of spreadsheets.
Metaplanet in Japan is carrying 35,102 Bitcoin at an average cost of $107,716 per coin. With Bitcoin trading around $78,500 in early February, that is roughly $1 billion underwater on paper. Trump Media holds 11,542 Bitcoin at an average cost of $118,529 — another $462 million in unrealized losses, sitting there on the balance sheet for every quarterly filing to broadcast. Neither company has collapsed. Neither has been forced to sell. But the discomfort is real and visible, and there’s a sense that investors who assumed the model was simple are now learning that what Saylor built took years of balance-sheet discipline that most imitators haven’t had time to develop.
What separates Strategy from its growing list of followers is not just the size of the position — though holding 712,647 Bitcoin at an average cost of $76,037 does give Saylor a buffer that late buyers simply don’t have. It’s the funding architecture. Strategy has built a machine: issue equity, issue Bitcoin-backed debt, buy more Bitcoin, repeat. The machine works when the stock trades at a premium to the underlying Bitcoin — a metric the industry calls mNAV, or multiple of net asset value. When that premium holds, the company can keep raising money cheaply and converting it into more BTC, compounding the position.
When the premium collapses — when the stock price slides toward or below the value of the Bitcoin it holds — the whole thing starts to run in reverse. Raising equity becomes dilutive. Debt becomes harder to service. And if the company holds near-term obligations it can’t refinance, the forced selling begins, pushing Bitcoin’s price lower and dragging other treasury companies closer to their own edge. Analysts have taken to calling this the mNAV death spiral. The name is accurate.
Nakamoto, trading publicly under the ticker NAKA, has already provided an early case study in what the spiral looks like. Its stock collapsed nearly 99% from its May 2025 peak. The company had built its entire identity around Bitcoin accumulation. When the premium evaporated, there was nothing else to point to. It’s hard not to notice how thin the distinction is between a company that is running this strategy with real discipline and one that is simply using Bitcoin as a story to tell equity markets, dressing up a struggling business in the vocabulary of monetary architecture because it generates interest.
Saylor himself has tried to draw that distinction clearly. He describes three tiers: pure play issuers like Strategy and Japan’s Metaplanet, where Bitcoin is the entire business; hybrid operators who hold Bitcoin alongside real operating businesses; and what might generously be called dabblers — companies that bought some Bitcoin hoping the narrative would do their equity a favor. The third category is the one that keeps financial analysts awake. Those companies don’t have the balance-sheet depth to ride out a prolonged drawdown, don’t have the institutional credibility to keep raising equity cheaply when sentiment turns, and don’t have the operational independence to simply wait. They need the market to stay generous. Markets, historically, are not generous on demand.
Tesla bought its Bitcoin early, averaging around $33,539 per coin, and sits roughly $517 million in the green — a position it arrived at through timing and conviction, not through a carefully engineered capital strategy. That early-entry cushion is something you can’t replicate by buying at cycle highs. Coinbase holds a similar buffer. These companies are not the ones the analysis needs to worry about. The ones worth watching are the companies that built their treasury positions in 2025, near or above the all-time high, with financing structures that assumed Bitcoin would keep cooperating. It’s still unclear how many of them can hold on long enough for the math to turn back in their direction. Some will. Others, probably, won’t.