- DWF Ventures ranked the 20 largest crypto treasury companies by the market value of their shares against the value of their . On 21 September, four of them were above water.
- Bit Digital was highest at 1.49x, followed by Strive at 1.21x, Hyperliquid Strategies at 1.17x and BitMine at 1.02x. Strategy, the company that wrote the playbook, sat just underneath at 0.97x.
- It is DWF’s own sample, its own calculations and a single day’s prices, published as a social media post by a firm that makes money in these markets.
For two years a growing group of listed companies has been raising money from shareholders and spending it on crypto. The trade depends on one condition: the shares have to be worth more than the coins sitting behind them. On DWF Ventures’ numbers, for sixteen of the twenty biggest, they no longer are.
Corporate treasury buying has been one of the steadiest sources of demand in crypto since 2024, and it was often sold to ordinary holders as patient money that would sit through the dips. That buying is conditional. It works while a company’s share price sits above the value of what it owns, and the mechanism jams when it doesn’t.
If these firms stop buying, or start selling coins to prop up their own share price, a slice of the bid underneath the market disappears. That reaches the price on your screen whether or not you have ever owned one of these shares.
Shares in, coins out
The model is simpler than the jargon around it. Take a company holding £100m of bitcoin whose shares the market values at £150m. It issues £15m of new stock, buys £15m of bitcoin, and every existing shareholder now owns slightly more bitcoin per share than they did the day before. The premium is the engine. The bigger it is, the more free money the company can hand its own holders just by repeating the trick.
The ratio people use to track this is mNAV: the market value of the company divided by the net asset value of its crypto. Above 1 and the shares cost more than the coins. Below 1 and you could, in theory, buy the same tokens cheaper by buying the company.
Underneath 1 the engine runs backwards. Issuing new shares at 0.97 to buy more tokens leaves each existing holder with fewer coins per share, not more, so the raise becomes very hard for a board to defend. The usual alternative is to buy back stock instead, and at that point the company is a seller of crypto rather than a buyer of it.
What DWF found
DWF Ventures, the venture arm of crypto market maker DWF Labs, ranked the twenty largest digital asset treasury companies by assets under management and published the result on X on 24 September. As of 21 September, four traded at a premium: Bit Digital at 1.49x, Strive at 1.21x, Hyperliquid Strategies at 1.17x and BitMine at 1.02x. Strategy came in at 0.97x. The lowest in the sample, SovereignAI, was at 0.22x. DWF says its calculation leaves debt and preferred stock out of the comparison, which matters for the companies that borrowed to buy.
DWF’s explanation for the shrinking premiums is that the reason to pay one has gone. When getting crypto exposure through a regulated account was awkward or forbidden, a listed company with tokens on its balance sheet was one of the few routes in. Spot , regulated private funds and institutional custody have since opened several others. “The access premium has reduced significantly over the years,” the firm wrote.
The report also asserts that most of the twenty have underperformed simply holding the underlying token since the day they adopted the strategy. That is DWF’s own finding rather than an audited one, and no independent data provider is cited in any of the coverage as having checked the figures.
What the numbers don’t prove
This is one day’s reading. mNAV moves with the share price every session, and a snapshot taken on 21 September does not establish that discounts are permanent. Nor does the report document a single company that actually tried to raise money and couldn’t. The constraint on the growth model is a structural argument, and a reasonable one, but it is an argument rather than a case study.
There is also evidence in the same report that cuts against the gloom. CoinCodex reported DWF finding that a couple of treasury stocks beat their underlying tokens by 15% to 40%, over a stretch of less than three months, which DWF put down to shifting sentiment rather than the companies buying more coins per share. Short windows in either direction are worth very little.
Separately, and bundled into much of the coverage, Sequans Communications disclosed that it had sold its remaining 314 bitcoin and left the treasury business entirely. That is a corporate filing, not part of DWF’s analysis, though it is the clearest example anyone has of a company deciding the trade is finished.
What to watch
Whether the discounts hold. A fortnight of sub-1 readings across most of the sector is a market mood; a quarter of them starts forcing decisions at board level.
After that, watch for share buybacks funded by token sales. That is the point at which the group flips from absorbing supply to adding to it, and it will show up in filings and in tracked wallets long before anyone announces it. We covered a version of that argument when Trump Media’s tracked bitcoin holdings began falling, over on markets.