Sixteen of the twenty largest digital asset treasury companies trade below the value of their crypto holdings, according to a new analysis by DWF Ventures. The measure, known as the market-value-to-net-asset-value ratio or mNAV, has fallen under 1 for most of the group, meaning investors can buy the tokens these firms own for less on the open market than the shares cost.
The finding lands on a sector that spent 2025 raising billions on the promise that a listed wrapper around a token pile deserved a premium. As of Sept. 21, only four of the top twenty firms by assets under management still traded above asset value. The rest are discount vehicles, and the discount shapes every decision they make about raising money.
Why the premium mattered
The treasury company model depends on a simple loop. When shares trade above the value of the tokens held, a firm can sell new equity, use the proceeds to buy more crypto, and increase the token backing behind each existing share. Existing holders end up with more exposure per share than they started with, without the price of the underlying asset moving at all.
When mNAV drops below 1, the loop breaks. Selling new common shares at a discount dilutes existing investors, since each new dollar raised buys less crypto relative to the share count added. Waiting to raise slows or stops token purchases. The premium was never cosmetic. It was the engine that let treasuries accumulate faster than open-market buyers could.
Companies can still raise through convertible debt or preferred shares, though each route carries terms that common shareholders have to weigh. Convertible holders may exchange their claims for shares if the stock reaches agreed conditions. Until then, the company carries the obligations attached to that capital structure, and preferred dividends can put pressure on reserves if financing tightens further. The analysis flags this explicitly. A firm whose fixed obligations grow faster than its token stack is not compounding anything, whatever the headline holding count says.
Three firms, three answers
Recent US filings show how differently operators respond to the same problem. Strategy, the largest bitcoin treasury, bought no bitcoin and sold no shares through its at-the-market program during its September reporting week. It instead spent $176.3 million repurchasing STRC preferred shares and doubled its digital credit securities repurchase authorization to $2 billion. Buying back its own preferred paper is a defensive move. It supports the capital structure rather than adding to the token count, and it signals that management sees the preferred’s terms as the binding constraint.
Strive took the opposite path. A Sept. 14 filing showed the company bought 469 BTC for about $36.6 million using proceeds from SATA preferred stock, lifting its holdings to 25,000 BTC as of Sept. 11. The filing gave investors both the purchase size and the security used to fund it, which matters in a market where the financing method is as informative as the purchase itself. Strive is still accumulating, but through debt rather than premium equity, which shifts risk from new shareholders to the balance sheet.
The DWF analysis notes a third group. Some treasury stocks beat their underlying tokens by 15 to 40 percent over a recent window of less than three months as discounts narrowed. Rebounds happen, but they have been the exception rather than the rule across the top twenty, and the report does not claim they mark a trend.
What separates the winners
The analysis argues that financing terms, operating income and management decisions now matter more when comparing treasury stocks than raw token counts. Two firms holding the same asset can trade at very different valuations if one funded the pile with cheap convertibles and the other with expensive preferred stock, or if one generates revenue and the other only holds. Token holdings per share remains the central measure of progress in the framework, but the financing path determines whether that number can still grow.
That is a shift from 2025, when the market mostly priced treasuries as leveraged proxies for their tokens. Investors now read the liabilities side of the balance sheet as closely as the assets. A firm trading at 0.8 times asset value is not automatically cheap. If its preferred dividends compound faster than its token grows, the discount can be justified, and buying the tokens directly is the better trade.
For the broader market, the numbers suggest the listing wave is consolidating. Firms that kept a premium can keep buying. Firms below asset value face a choice between dilutive raises, debt-funded purchases like Strive’s, or capital returns like Strategy’s buyback. None of the three paths compounds tokens per share the way premium issuance did, which is why the sector’s accumulation phase is slowing even where the underlying assets are not.
The report does not forecast where mNAV ratios settle. But the structure it describes is familiar from earlier market cycles. Listed wrappers trade at premiums while they can create value through issuance, and at discounts once they cannot. Sixteen of twenty now sit on the wrong side of that line, and the filings from the past two weeks show each of them picking a different way to live with it.
The next test comes with quarterly reporting. If operating income and financing costs start appearing side by side with token counts in investor presentations, the sector will have completed its move from growth story to balance sheet story. The DWF data suggests that shift is already underway.