Bitcoin corporate treasuries

What a treasury company actually is

A Bitcoin treasury company is a listed business that has decided its best use of capital is to own BTC. It raises money in the equity or credit markets, buys coins, and reports the pile as an asset. Shareholders are buying two things at once: the coins, and a company whose job is to keep acquiring more of them per share than it did last time.

That second half is what separates this page from the Bitcoin ETF dashboard. A fund is a pass-through and its size is a count of coins. A treasury company is a balance sheet, and the same holdings can be worth more or less than the coins depending entirely on what the market will pay for the shares wrapped around them.

The flywheel, and the number that ends it

The mechanism every one of these companies runs is the same. Issue shares above the value of the coins already held, use the cash to buy more coins, and the coins-per-share of the existing holders goes up rather than down. Dilution that makes you richer is a strange idea the first time you meet it, and it is the whole business model.

The number that governs it is mNAV: the company's market value divided by the value of its holdings. Above one, the flywheel turns. Below one, it does not merely slow, it reverses. Every share issued below one raises less money than the coins standing behind it, so continuing to issue transfers value away from the holders it is supposed to serve.

How to read the chart

The chart is a treemap of the whole complex. Every listed holder is a tile, and the area of the tile is the BTC it holds, so the largest names are the largest rectangles and the rest fill in around them. Holders past the tile count are folded into one grey tile, so the map always adds up to the total under it rather than to a selection of it.

• Profit and loss colours each tile by the unrealised gain or loss on the disclosed cost: green where the coins are worth more than they cost, red where they are worth less, deeper with the size of the gap. A grey tile is a company that has not disclosed what it paid.
• Rank colours the tiles down the ranking, largest first, in the same ramp the table below uses, so a tile and its row are the same object.

Read the shapes first and the colours second and you have the sector in one picture: who holds the coins, and who can afford to keep holding them. Holdings are the figure everyone quotes and the one least likely to be wrong; the average price paid is the one that decides whether the balance sheet is an asset or a problem.

What is particular about the Bitcoin cohort

Bitcoin is where the treasury company was invented, and the shape of the sector still reflects that. One company started buying in 2020, spent five years refining a way to fund it, and now holds more of the complex than everyone else put together. Nothing on this page is legible until you accept that the field is one company and a long tail.

The reason it stayed that way is funding. The largest holder does not raise equity alone; it issues convertible notes and preferred stock against a Bitcoin balance sheet, which lets it buy coins with money that does not dilute anyone until the shares are far higher. That instrument, sometimes marketed as digital credit, is the actual product. The Bitcoin is the collateral behind it.

It is also, with Zcash, one of only two of the five assets here that pay their holder nothing. A Bitcoin treasury earns no yield, so the entire return has to come from the coin price and from buying more coins per share than the last raise did. That makes the cost basis in the table below unusually load-bearing: with no income to average the entry down, what a company paid is what it has to beat.

A treasury stock is not a spot ETF

Both give you exposure to the same coin, and they are not close to the same instrument. An ETF holds the asset and charges a fee; its share price tracks the coins less that fee, and the arbitrage that keeps it honest runs every day. A treasury company holds the asset and everything else too: debt that has to be serviced, shares that can be issued at any moment, a management team making decisions, and a price set by whoever is willing to trade the equity that day.

The trade people are actually making when they buy the stock instead of the fund is leverage plus optionality: more coin exposure per dollar while the premium holds, and the chance that management adds coins per share faster than the fee drags. The risk is the same sentence read backwards. If you want the coin without the balance sheet, the Bitcoin ETF dashboard is the wrapper to compare it against.

What it cannot tell you

• Holdings move at the speed of disclosure: The valuation on this page is live; the coin counts behind it are the latest each company has published, which for most is a monthly or quarterly filing. A company that bought yesterday will not show it today.
• Roughly half the field reports no cost basis, usually because the coins were mined or received rather than bought. Those rows read "not reported", and the average entry above is the average of the companies that do report, not of the sector.
• There is no mNAV, no debt and no share count here: The leverage behind these balance sheets is the most important thing about them and it lives in filings, not in a holdings feed.
• Only listed companies appear: Governments, funds, foundations and private holders are outside this source, so the coins on this page are a subset of the coins held in size.
• Liquidity is not in the table: A large position in a thin asset cannot be sold at the price used to mark it, and nothing here adjusts for that.