“Just buy an ETF.” That blunt advice from Strive Asset Management CEO Matt Cole during a panel at Hong Kong’s Bitcoin Asia in August summed up the growing frustration with digital asset Treasuries (DATs), the corporate vehicles that promise to outperform bitcoin. through smart financing and balance sheet engineering, but so far they are struggling to deliver on that promise.
Bitcoin itself is up about 23% this year. However, most digital asset Treasuries, including MicroStrategy, Semler Scientific, GameStop, and Trump Media, have far trailed both BTC and the ETFs that track them. Only a few outliers, such as Twenty One Capital and Japan’s Metaplanet, which has been prone to volatility, have managed to outperform the benchmark index.
That gap exposes the core weakness of DAT trading. These companies were built to outperform BTC through leverage, financing, or operating alpha, but most are falling behind on the simplest possible exposure.
The leveraged beta proposition with balance sheet discipline only works when equity premiums, convertibles and debt markets remain friendly. Think about how toxic Strategy’s $8 billion of debt would look if there were a rate hike. With an average coupon of just 0.42% and maturities stretching over four years, those bonds seem manageable today, but that comfort fades in a world of higher rates.
Even though headlines appear daily about crypto entrepreneurs taking over a shell company and filling their balance sheet with BTC, the warnings are getting louder.
Galaxy Digital has warned that the entire structure depends on a persistent premium to net asset value, a reflexive setup reminiscent of the investment trust boom of the 1920s. NYDIG has been equally critical, arguing that the industry’s favorite “mNAV” metric masks liabilities and inflates per-share exposure by assuming debt conversions that never happen.
None of this means that corporate adoption of bitcoin is a mirage; is growing faster than ever. There are almost 40% more public companies holding bitcoin today than there were three months ago, according to data compiled by Bitwise.
Some of these companies are real companies that hold BTC on their balance sheet due to the nature of their industry, such as Coinbase, Bullish (Bullish is the parent company of CoinDesk), or BTC miners like MARA. Others consider it a protection against fiduciary instability.
But many companies on Bitwise’s list are BTC DATs, and it’s important to differentiate them from other DATs that list proof-of-stake altcoins like ETH or Solana. This is a different offer.
By staking native assets and operational validators, these DATs derive returns not from leverage but from network activity itself. For example, owning an ETH or TRX DAT would be exposed to Ethereum or Tron, the networks where the stablecoin revolution lives. In theory, this exposure turns treasuries into miniature ecosystems, increasing in value as the network scales.
Tron’s listingco SRM, now Tron Inc after a rocky start, is showing how this is done. Almost half of USDT activity is done on Tron, so if investors want a ‘Visa moment’ for USDT, especially in the most interesting markets for stablecoins like Latin America, Tron Inc is a DAT that fits this bill.
Still, that kind of chain exposure remains the exception, not the rule. Most DATs haven’t figured out how to translate balance sheet size into operational performance or network share. They were supposed to be smarter than ETFs, capital efficient, profitable and linked to the real economic flow of blockchains, but many remain little more than leveraged substitutes for bitcoin beta.
Until more treasury firms can demonstrate that they can compound capital faster than a passive ETF, the simplest conclusion from the Hong Kong scenario might remain the best: just buy the ETF.
