It's not been a great year for Digital Asset Treasury companies

One of the defining trends in the mainstreaming of cryptocurrencies this year has been the explosion of Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) companies across numerous industries in the corporate world.

In 2021, fewer than 10 companies held bitcoin (BTC) in their treasuries, according to data from DLA Piper. Four years later, there are now 190 companies with BTC in their treasuries, with another 10 to 20 companies that have alternative digital assets on their balance sheets.

All these companies are following the playbook created by Michael Saylor, who is considered the godfather of the DAT model.

Saylor turned his software business MicroStrategy (MSTR) into a bitcoin treasury company back in August 2020 when he bought 21,454 bitcoins, which was worth over $250 million at the time.

MicroStrategy became the first publicly traded company to purchase crypto as part of its capital allocation strategy.

Now renamed Strategy, the company said this week that it bought $962.7 million worth of bitcoin between Dec. 1 and Dec. 7, acquiring 10,624 tokens at an average of $90,615 per token. As of December 2025, the company now holds over 660K bitcoin in its treasury.

Investors were immediately bullish on Saylor's strategy back in 2020, years before bitcoin's price began surging to record highs. The company's stock soared more than 600% in the six months after Saylor made his first big purchase of BTC tokens.

As companies began emulating Saylor's DAT model this year, one of driving motivators behind the move was to drive up their stock price, or sometimes to even save their stock from being delisted by the exchanges.

And this strategy usually worked, as the share price of nearly every company that announced it was creating a treasury of digital assets would skyrocket - at least in the short term.

But in a year when bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies suffered dramatic losses, it's been rough sledding for DAT company stocks.

Debt and losses pile up

Rumble (RUM), a right-wing video sharing platform, announced in March that it was buying $17.1 million in bitcoin to launch its treasury. Its stock is down 44.4% for the year.

GameStop (GME), which began buying bitcoin this past spring, has seen its stock tumble 29.4% YTD. Shares of KULR Technology (KULR), which said in December that that it would allocate 90% of its excess cash to BTC, have plunged 86%.

Janover, which has changed its name to the DeFi Development Corp. (DFDV), saw its stock soar 64% back in April when it announced its plans to build a DAT centered around Solana (SOL).

Its stock has actually surged 740.6% for the year, making it an outlier among DAT companies, but its shares have also plummeted nearly 78% over the last six months as the entire crypto market has swooned.

Even the Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT), which launched its own DAT earlier this year with Cronos (CRO), the native token of Crypto.com, has seen its stock dive nearly 67%.

(Of course, when your company's stock is tied to the approval ratings of President Trump, there could be other factors driving its share price down).

As for Strategy, its stock is down 36.3% as it has seen $73 billion in value erased by the downturn in bitcoin's price.

Nonetheless, 15 of the 19 analysts that cover the stock still have it as a Buy, as Bloomberg notes, which speaks to the fact that Wall Street expects BTC to rally again and shake off its slump.

But with a market cap of about $53.9 billion, Strategy is in a much stronger position than nearly all of the other companies that turned to the DAT model in its wake.

This makes it difficult to use its performance as a metric to draw conclusions about the firms that have followed in its footsteps with crypto treasuries.

In fact, 73% of the companies with bitcoin treasuries carry debt, while another 39% have more debt than the value of their BTC holdings, according to a study conducted by Cointab.

The study also found that one in 10 DAT companies are using their debt to buy more bitcoin.

And since bitcoin began its crash on Oct. 10, 84% of companies with a BTC treasury have seen their stock price decline, according to Cointab. The average drop has been 27%.