The business model that transformed publicly traded companies into bitcoin treasuries is compromised by the cryptocurrency's decline, which has fallen more than 50% since its peak in October 2025.
According to data from bitcointreasuries.net, 30 of the companies that have placed bitcoin at the center of their balance sheets are currently trading with mNAV (multiple over net assets) below 1 – meaning they are worth less on the stock market than the bitcoin they hold in cash. Among them is Strategy, founded by Michael Saylor, which pioneered the strategy.
A mNAV below 1 stifles the main growth lever for these companies: the ability to issue shares to buy more bitcoin. When the share is worth more than the bitcoin in cash, it's possible to issue paper and use the money to buy more cryptocurrency. But if this relationship reverses, the mechanism stops turning.
Based on the premise that cash flow wasn't yielding enough returns and the dollar was weakening, Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy began leveraging its assets, issuing stock and debt to buy Bitcoin, back in 2020. The bet was that the cryptocurrency's rise—which had increased by more than 6,000% in the last half of the decade—would more than offset future expenses.
The strategy was initially met with skepticism, but it quickly spread around the world when the company's stock—until then unremarkable—entered a strong upward trend. In five years, the shares rose by more than 2,000%, and the company became the largest corporate holder of bitcoin in the world, with an estimated reserve of US$53 billion. With this size, it abandoned the "micro" and adopted the name Strategy.
While Bitcoin was booming, dozens of companies worldwide adopted the same approach. In Brazil, Méliuz set Bitcoin purchases as its ultimate goal for the first half of 2025. In October 2025, when Bitcoin reached a high of US$126,000, OranjeBTC went public on the B3 stock exchange through a reverse IPO , aiming to become the largest Bitcoin treasury company in Latin America.
OranjeBTC was founded with the premise of being the largest bitcoin treasury company in Latin America and has repeatedly cited Michael Saylor as a reference. However, like Strategy, its shares have suffered from the fall in bitcoin. Since its debut in October 2025 , at the peak of the cryptocurrency, its shares have fallen by about 75 %, while Strategy has fallen by more than 60% in the same period.
The drop in stock prices represents not only the devaluation of these companies' reserves, but also greater skepticism about the business model fueled, in part, by Strategy itself. At the end of May, the company sold bitcoin for the first time in four years: 32 coins for US$2.5 million, according to a document filed with the SEC.
The goal was to reinforce a dollar reserve, created in December 2025, to honor recurring payments assumed by the company in preferred stock and debt issuances. It was a tiny fraction of the more than 843,000 coins that Strategy holds, but the move was enough to shake the market, with bitcoin falling another 13% in the days following the sale.
Since last year, S&P Global Ratings has been warning about the risks of the model. In October of last year, when giving Strategy the first credit rating ever assigned to a bitcoin treasury firm, the agency classified the company as "B-" — six notches below investment grade.
S&P pointed to the high concentration in bitcoin, the narrow business focus, and the low dollar liquidity, highlighting that the company's assets "do not generate cash flow." The central warning was the mismatch: while reserves are in bitcoin, debt and preferred stock dividends are paid in dollars.
"In our view, this increases the likelihood that, when the company actually has to sell bitcoin to generate cash as a last resort, it will probably do so at severely depressed prices."
The lingering question is how long Strategy, with reserves about 20 times those of the second-largest bitcoin treasury firm, will continue selling its cryptocurrencies while it can no longer raise capital by issuing shares.
House of Cards
And the problem isn't just with Strategy. The model of going public to buy bitcoin, especially via SPACs, has started to crumble abroad.
Shares of Avalanche Treasury, which debuted sharply lower on the Nasdaq last week, have already fallen nearly 90%, with the stock trading below $1. The change in sentiment, according to Bloomberg , also led to the failure of a $1 billion merger between asset manager ReserveOne and a SPAC after at least two major investors demanded its cancellation, fearing that the stock would become worth less than bitcoin in cash.
According to Bloomberg, all of publicly traded treasury firms lost approximately $62 billion in market value between the peak of Bitcoin in October and the beginning of June.
In Brazil, unable to raise capital through a share issuance, OranjeBTC resorted to the opposite approach: buying back its own shares. The company says it intensified its buybacks when the discount reached "levels below 0.80x mNAV," understanding that buying its own shares at that level is equivalent to acquiring bitcoin at a cost below the market price.
To reduce dilution, the company also accepted the early redemption of a convertible debenture issue, eliminating the possibility of issuing approximately 6.96 million new shares.
Based on the first quarter's balance sheet, OranjeBTC has an average acquisition cost of approximately R$ 593,000 per bitcoin — an amount driven by purchases made near the peak in October 2025. At the end of March, with the cryptocurrency's decline, that same reserve was worth R$ 356,000 per coin, a devaluation that accounted for a loss of R$ 460.7 million in the quarter.
A different case is that of Méliuz. The cashback company also chose bitcoin as its main treasury asset and, like the others, had an accounting loss in the first quarter due to the fall in the cryptocurrency.
But, unlike OranjeBTC and Strategy itself, Méliuz doesn't rely on issuing shares or debt to buy bitcoin: it maintains an operational business that generates cash and uses the surplus of that cash to strengthen its position in the cryptocurrency. In the first quarter, the company had record net revenue of R$ 118.2 million and adjusted EBITDA of R$ 30.1 million.
The difference is evident in the price. While OranjeBTC and Strategy trade with mNAV below 1 — meaning they are worth less on the exchange than the bitcoin they hold in their reserves — Méliuz trades at 2.41 times the value of its reserves, according to the company's own treasury dashboard.
Even after Bitcoin's price plummeted, the market still pays more than double the value of Méliuz's reserve. The premium reflects the cashback business generating cash behind the treasury, something that pure treasuries don't have to offer.
The stock also felt the cryptocurrency's fall much less: since October, when bitcoin hit its peak, CASH3 has fallen by about 5%, compared to 67% for Strategy and 75% for OranjeBTC in the same period.
Abroad, more than 100 publicly traded companies hold bitcoin on their balance sheets without it affecting the value of their shares, as they have other sources of revenue.
Tesla, for example, holds 11,500 bitcoins in cash, but is worth more than $1 trillion selling cars, while Jack Dorsey's fintech company Block has about 8,600 bitcoins, but is valued for its payments business.
In all these cases, the fall in bitcoin generated accounting losses — Tesla, for example, suffered US$173 million in losses with the cryptocurrency in the first quarter — but it does not threaten the business model, because the reserve is an accessory, not the central asset.
