Decrypt's 2025 Story of the Year: Crypto Treasury Firms Flood Wall Street

Are crypto-buying firms destined to become a pillar of Wall Street, or will they be remembered as just another fad, echoing the booms and busts of previous market cycles?

That question has bubbled to the surface in recent months, as a long line of firms that collectively raised billions of dollars to stockpile digital assets have seen share prices plunge, following a frenzy of pivots and mergers earlier this year.

Whether it’s NFTs or meme coins, pockets of speculation emerge with each bull run, creating periods of hype that inevitably fade away. This year, the novelty of crypto treasury firms wore thin, as various members of the industry’s latest parade grew strained, yet many maintain that their approach to reshaping the traditional financial realm is distinct.

A number of crypto-buying firms that tapped public markets this year styled themselves after Strategy, borrowing elements of the Bitcoin-buying pioneer’s playbook to accumulate everything from Dogecoin to Tron. Still, outliers like GameStop put their own spin on the game.

As the year progressed, Strategy itself adapted to an increasingly crowded field, issuing new types of securities to add to its namesake stockpile. Nonetheless, one of its most popular tools grew less effective, as some of its nascent competitors were snatched up.

In some ways, the future may be uncertain for crypto treasury firms, but amid a supportive regulatory environment, it appears that more will hit the market. Regardless, this year could be remembered as the moment that the trend reached its feverpitch, fleshing out a whole new class of investments for institutions and individuals to navigate.

Kristen Smith, President of Solana Policy Institute, told Decrypt that a change in leadership at the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Donald Trump has likely enabled more crypto treasury firms to come to fruition

Instead of pursuing a time-consuming public offering, many crypto treasury firms have stemmed 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] originated by a reverse takeover,” she said “The SEC, under the prior administration, would never have signed off on these companies coming into existence.”

Hello mNAV

If hundreds of publicly traded companies begin buying Bitcoin all at once, how can investors separate the winners from the losers? At its most basic, the industry’s answer was mNAV.

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

Typically, a company’s mNAV is calculated by dividing its market cap by the net value of its crypto holdings, producing a multiple that reflects a premium or a discount. However, some firms, including Strategy, calculate mNAV using enterprise value instead of market cap, which takes into consideration the company’s debt and cash on hand.

The multiple has significance for crypto treasury firms beyond measuring sentiment. It’s also core to one of Strategy’s most popular approaches to raising cash for its Bitcoin purchases.

When mNAV is positive, the company can issue common stock to buy Bitcoin in a way that increases its holdings per share, which Strategy tracks as Bitcoin yield. Many fledgling firms adopted this metric as their north star, increasing crypto per share as their primary goal.

The crypto treasury firms that debuted this year came in all shapes and sizes. Some cultivated cannabis before pivoting to digital assets or manufactured medical devices. In fact, the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin in Japan, Metaplanet, has managed so-called love hotels.

In October, Marty Kendall compared the bevy of Bitcoin-buying firms to a “gold rush.” Along those lines, the company that he co-founded was designed to “sell shovels.”

As fledgling firms embraced mNAV, Kendall’s company built dashboards for dozens of them that displayed the metric, among others, including their performance against Bitcoin.

Many crypto treasury firms saw mNAVs balloon early on, but their stock prices eventually slipped below the value of their crypto holdings. Strategy sank below the mark in November, limiting its ability to take advantage of a premium that had existed for nearly 22 months.

This year, Strategy has issued several types of preferred shares, using dividend-paying products as another way to fund purchases. However, only a couple other firms have been able to do so, as a once notable source of demand for digital assets has become constrained.

Different Strokes

Nobody thinks of Tesla as a crypto treasury firm, yet the automaker has held 11,500 Bitcoin worth $1 billion, as of early December, on its balance sheet for several years.

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

Despite posing in photos alongside Strategy co-founder and Executive Chairman Michal Saylor, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen said from the beginning that the firm is “not following anyone else's strategy” when it comes to stacking Bitcoin.

After raising over a billion dollars through convertible debit, GameStop hasn’t announced another Bitcoin purchase since, appearing to only get its feet wet.

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

Bitcoin wasn’t adopted by “Magnificent Seven” stocks, but around 200 publicly traded companies now hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet, according to Bitcoin Treasuries. Around two dozen own Ethereum, according to Strategic Ethereum Reserve.

A mushrooming number of crypto-buying firms made it increasingly difficult for companies to differentiate themselves from each other, while sucking oxygen away from established firms, according to Ram Ahluwalia, CEO and co-founder of investment advisor Lumida Wealth.

“There’s been a proliferation of these, and it’s led to attention fragmentation and liquidity fragmentation,” he told Decrypt. “I think you’ll see some M&A in the category, but it's still early, and we have to see who's going to play that role.”

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

Beyond Bitcoin

This year, it appeared that any company could become a crypto treasury firm. That includes a Tron-buying company that specializes in producing toys and theme park merchandise.

But at one point, getting digital assets on a company's balance sheet wasn’t so easy, according to 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 reserve assets but later scrapped the plan.

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

At AlphaTON Capital, Kaiser is now stockpiling Toncoin. The cryptocurrency is used for games and transactions on The Open Network, a project that the co-founders of the messaging app Telegram stepped away from in 2020 amid regulatory scrutiny. In January, however, The Open Network Foundation and Telegram announced an “exclusivity deal.”

The company has a legacy biotech arm 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 business application. 

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

AlphaTON is also taking advantage of staking—that is, pledging a certain amount of a blockchain network’s native tokens to the network itself, in exchange for rewards. By participating in the process of validating transactions on proof-of-stake networks, many crypto treasury firms have been able to use their holdings to earn additional revenue, including those dedicated to Ethereum and Solana.

SOL Strategies is focused on staking as much Solana as it can as the company builds out its own validators of networks, according to CTO Max Kaplan. BitMine Immersion Technologies, the largest corporate holder of Ethereum, is also leaning into the prospect of validators.

“The most important metric that we're focused on is delegated stake,” Kaplan told Decrypt. “We're really focused on the long term here, and that’s where our validator strategy helps.”

Exit Strategy

Toward the end of the year, the future appeared to be growing uncertain for a number of crypto-buying firms that sought to capitalize on one of Wall Street’s hottest trends.

With mNAVs showing discounts, the ability to raise funding for many new companies was constrained. Still, some companies remained steadfast in efforts to accumulate digital assets, with distinct goals, including owning a certain amount of a cryptocurrency’s supply.

If the hype surrounding crypto treasury firms continues to fade, behemoths like Strategy may consider lending their Bitcoin, per Bloomberg. Still, that route may not be practical for crypto-buying firms that made their first purchase mere months ago.