Hardly a year after it began, the Bitcoin treasury model is falling apart.
Just one Bitcoin treasury company managed to outperform the bellwether S&P 500 — which returned investors 16% — in 2025, according to a new report from BitcoinTreasuries.net.
The Blockchain Group, a France-based treasury company, has soared roughly 164% since January 1.
What about other Bitcoin treasuries?
Every other major treasury has underperformed — Strategy is down 12%, Metaplanet has lost nearly one-third of its stock price, and Nakamoto, the self-proclaimed treasury company for treasury companies that raised over $600 million to buy Bitcoin, has bled out over 98%.
Additionally, 60% of these companies are now underwater on their Bitcoin investments.
“The premium era is over,” said John Fakhoury, CEO of Stacking Sats, in the report published on Thursday. “We’re entering a phase where only disciplined structures and real business execution are going to survive.”
Buying has collapsed
Between 2024 and early 2025, Bitcoin treasury companies raised billions by trading at massive premiums to their Bitcoin holdings, then ploughing that capital into buying more Bitcoin.
The poster child for the movement, Michael Saylor’s Strategy, has raised over $20 billion since August 2020 by selling investors on the thesis that Bitcoin would outperform traditional assets and that the company’s equity would trade at a persistent premium to its net asset value.
Now there are 195 companies all betting on the same thing.
But the trade, once profitable, is now breaking down, turning companies away from digital assets en masse.
Only 28 companies picked up Bitcoin in November, down from 55 in October and 168 Bitcoin in July — an 83% collapse from peak buying.
That’s because, as the model of raising billions by selling equity and debt cratered, so too did the capital exchanging those funds for fresh Bitcoin.
When equity trades at a premium to Bitcoin NAV, companies issue shares and use the proceeds to buy more Bitcoin without diluting shareholders. Equity trading at a discount implies that issuing shares destroys shareholder value.
Treasury buying provided a structural bid to Bitcoin throughout 2024 and early 2025.
As that bid disappeared, Bitcoin lost a major support pillar.
Price drops premium drops
The model depended on two things: rising Bitcoin prices and sustained equity premiums.
These days, both have disappeared.
Bitcoin fell 25% from its October highs above $120,000, dragging treasury stocks down with it. But the equity collapses were far worse than Bitcoin’s decline — revealing that premium compressing, and not necessarily Bitcoin’s price, was destroying shareholder value.
Strategy, the first company to begin scooping up Bitcoin back in 2020, now trades at a 16% discount. Two years ago, investors were paying a sevenfold premium for the stock.
That collapse has erased most of the arbitrage trade that was fuelling Strategy’s stock price appreciation.
The former Japanese hotel operator, Metaplanet, saw its premium collapse to 7% from 237% earlier this year.
