“Just buy an ETF. » This blunt advice from Strive Asset Management CEO Matt Cole during a panel at Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong 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 this commitment.
Bitcoin itself is up about 23% this year. Yet most digital asset treasuries, including MicroStrategy, Semler Scientific, GameStop, and Trump Media, have tracked both BTC and the ETFs that track it. Only a few outliers, like Twenty One Capital and Japan’s volatility-prone Metaplanet, managed to beat the benchmark.
This gap reveals the main weakness of the DAT trade. These companies were designed to outperform BTC through leverage, funding, or operational alpha, but most are lagging behind in the simplest possible exposure.
The principle of leveraged beta combined with balance sheet discipline only works when equity premiums, convertible bonds and debt markets remain favorable. Consider how toxic Strategy’s $8 billion debt will be if rates rise. With an average coupon of just 0.42% and maturities spanning four years, these bonds seem manageable today, but that comfort disappears in a world of higher rates.
Even as headlines continue daily about crypto entrepreneurs taking over a shell company and filling its balance sheet with BTC, the warnings are growing 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-favored “mNAV” metric obscures liabilities and inflates per-share exposure by assuming debt conversions that never take place.
None of this means that enterprise adoption of Bitcoin is a mirage; it is growing faster than ever. According to data compiled by Bitwise, there are nearly 40% more public companies holding bitcoin today than there were three months ago.
Some of these companies are real businesses that have BTC on their balance sheet due to the nature of their industry, like Coinbase, Bullish (Bullish is the parent company of CoinDesk), or BTC miners like MARA. Others use it as a hedge against fiduciary instability.
But many of the 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 mining validators, these DATs generate yield not through leverage but through network activity itself. For example, owning an ETH or a TRX DAT would allow you to be exposed to Ethereum or Tron – the networks on which the stablecoin revolution lives. In theory, this exhibition transforms the treasures into miniature ecosystems, the value of which increases as the network evolves.
Tron’s listing company SRM, which became Tron Inc after a rocky start, shows how it’s done. Nearly half of USDT activity resides on Tron, so if investors want a “Visa moment” for USDT – especially in the most exciting markets for stablecoins like Latin America – Tron Inc is a DAT that fits that bill.
However, this type of on-chain exposure remains the exception and not the rule. Most DATs have not understood how to translate balance sheet size into operational performance or network participation. They were supposed to be smarter than ETFs, capital-efficient, yield-generating, and tied to the real economic flow of blockchains, but many remain little more than leveraged proxies for Bitcoin beta.
Until more treasury companies can prove they can compound capital faster than a passive ETF, the simplest takeaway from the Hong Kong scene may remain the best: just buy the ETF.
