Bitcoin Treasury Companies Aren't Dead. The Free Money Is.

The bitcoin treasury trade isn't dead. But the version of it that handed every small-cap board a blank cheque in 2024 is gone, and the companies still standing should be quietly grateful for that.

Jag Kooner, who runs derivatives at Bitfinex, reckons the era of indiscriminate raises is finished. That's the polite version. The blunter version is that the flywheel broke, and it broke because the thing that powered it was never bitcoin. It was the premium.

What Actually Broke

Here's the mechanism, stripped of the marketing. A listed company trades at a multiple of its net asset value. It issues shares at that multiple, buys bitcoin, and the NAV per share goes up without any operating business doing anything. Repeat until the multiple collapses. Then stop.

The multiple collapsed.

Strategy, still the reference point for the entire category, carried a market-to-NAV premium north of 3x in late 2024. By the back end of 2025 that had compressed toward 1.2x, give or take the day. The same compression hit everyone else, because the premium was never a company-specific phenomenon. It was a category-wide enthusiasm trade, and enthusiasm trades all end the same way.

The numbers are brutal in aggregate. More than a hundred listed companies announced bitcoin treasury strategies during 2025. Most of them were sub-$500 million market caps with no revenue line worth modelling. Several are now trading below the value of the coins they hold, which is the market saying, plainly, that it would rather own the bitcoin directly. Bitcoin's own run to roughly $126,000 in October 2025 didn't rescue them, and the subsequent slide into the high $80,000s finished the job.

So no, a rally won't bring back the easy money. A rally brings back buyers of bitcoin. Buyers of bitcoin aren't the same thing as buyers of a 1.4x NAV premium and a management fee.

The European Angle

Europe has watched this from the cheap seats, and mostly that's been a blessing.

There's a structural reason the American treasury playbook doesn't port cleanly across the Atlantic. EU company law gives shareholders pre-emption rights on new issues, and disapplying them requires a general meeting, a good reason, and time. The at-the-market facility, the financial equivalent of a tap you leave running, doesn't exist in the same form. A European issuer can't raise 200 million euros on a Tuesday afternoon because the chart looked good at lunch.

Brussels moves slowly. But when it moves, it moves everyone.

And MiCA sits on top of all of it. Worth being precise here, because the confusion is widespread. MiCA doesn't regulate bitcoin. It doesn't regulate a corporate balance sheet holding bitcoin either. A listed industrial with 5,000 BTC in a cold wallet isn't a CASP, owes ESMA nothing, and shouldn't be calling a lawyer about Article 59. That's the good news.

The moment a treasury vehicle starts doing anything beyond holding, the picture changes. Lending coins to a counterparty for yield. Offering tokenized exposure to retail. Running a staking service on the side. Each of those pulls you into a licensing conversation, and under MiCA the licensing conversation is 27 national regulators applying 27 national instincts to the same rulebook. Harmonization sounds clean. The reality is 27 national interpretations.

The passporting question is where this gets interesting. A CASP licensed in one member state gets to work across the union, in theory. In practice, supervisory convergence is still a work in progress, and the poor souls at ESMA know it. So a treasury company in Frankfurt that wants to add a yield product has a genuine decision to make about which regulator it wants to live with for the next five years.

The Steelman

Now the case against me, because it isn't weak.

Bulls will point out that the premium isn't the only source of value. There's a real arbitrage here, and it works in both directions. When a vehicle trades below NAV, the rational move is to buy back stock, and a few have started doing exactly that. That's accretive to remaining holders and it's the sort of capital discipline the sector spent two years avoiding. Credit where it's due.

There's also an argument that consolidation is healthy. Twenty well-run vehicles with transparent treasury policies, real disclosure, and sensible tap into beat a hundred shells raising money on momentum. If a genuine bitcoin rally arrives in the first half of 2026, the survivors could re-rate hard. A vehicle sitting at 1.1x NAV with 40,000 coins and a functioning buyback has real torque if sentiment turns.

And the bears have their own blind spot. Plenty of people writing off the sector are assuming bitcoin goes sideways. If it doesn't, if it clears its old high with volume, the premium comes back, thinner and more selective, but it comes back.

Fair. I'll take the other side anyway.

The Verdict

Most of the treasury companies launched in 2025 will be gone or repurposed by 2027. Not because bitcoin failed. Because they were a financing structure wearing a bitcoin costume, and financing structures without a moat get arbitraged to zero. This is the boring, correct outcome.

The survivors will be a short list. Strategy's scale gives it options nobody else has, including index inclusion and a shareholder base that treats the stock as a bitcoin proxy with a yield curve. Metaplanet's 30,000-plus coins and its Japanese retail base make it a genuine local franchise rather than a pure arbitrage. Beyond those, look for companies with an actual operating business underneath the treasury, because cash flow means you don't need to sell equity at a premium to survive a drawdown.

And Europe? Europe won't produce a Metaplanet clone, and that's a feature, not a bug. The pre-emption rights, the prospectus burden, the MiCA perimeter, all of it acts as a filter. Fewer vehicles, slower launches, less reflexive capital. Duller. Better.

So watch what happens when the next rally comes. The question isn't whether treasury buying returns. It's whether the companies doing the buying can fund it from operations instead of from a premium that only exists in a bull market. That's the whole ballgame.

One more thought for anyone drafting a treasury strategy right now. MiCA is 150 pages. The implementation guidance is 400 more. The devil lives in the delegated acts. Read them before you announce anything.