As at 26 August 2026 this sector is in a drawdown, and the arithmetic that built it has reversed. Bitcoin peaked around $126,000 in October 2025, was marked at $58,532 at 30 June 2026 in Nakamoto's own Form 10-Q, and traded at about $78,986 on the date of this snapshot. On that date most of these companies were valued at less than the coins they hold — Twenty One 0.77, Nakamoto 0.85, Capital B 0.59, DDC 0.45 (aggregator data, enterprise-value basis) — and below 1.0 the machine runs backwards, because issuing shares to buy coins then destroys coins per share. Three things most lists still get wrong. Holdings go stale within days, since many of these companies disclose weekly. A large share of "coins held" is pledged, loaned or derecognised entirely rather than owned free and clear — 51% of Riot's stack and 85% of Nakamoto's at 30 June 2026. And several of the best-known names have already sold everything, been taken over, delisted, or never listed at all. These shares are not the coin, and neither the FSCS nor the Financial Ombudsman makes good a fall in their value.
UK readers should start on the UK page, not this one. This is the global directory and it deliberately excludes London-listed names. If you are looking at companies you can realistically buy through a UK broker, in sterling, with RNS announcements you can read on the day, go to UK-listed bitcoin treasury companies first and come back here for the international context. Everything below is a US, Japanese, Hong Kong, European or Canadian issuer, reported in the currency of its own filings.
What this page is, and what it is not
This is a dated snapshot of listed companies that hold cryptocurrency as a treasury asset, compiled on 26 August 2026 from the documents named against each figure. It is not a league table, not a ranking of quality, and explicitly not a buy list. Naming a company here is not an endorsement of it, of its shares, of its preferred stock or of the token it holds. We publish no price views, no targets and no allocations.
Treat every number as perishable. Several of these companies disclose holdings weekly by Form 8-K, so a figure can be out of date within days of publication. Any list you find without an "as at" date on every row — including this one, if you are reading it in six months — is telling you what was true on some unknown day.
How we grade every figure on this page
Holdings numbers in this sector are not all the same kind of claim, and the difference matters more than the number. Every figure below carries a grade:
- Filed fact — taken from a company's own regulatory filing (SEC Form 10-Q, 10-K, 8-K or 6-K; an HKEX announcement; a Euronext regulatory release). This is the strongest grade available.
- Company statement — the company said it, in a presentation, dashboard or press release, but we could not tie it to a filed document.
- Market data — a price or market capitalisation observed on a date.
- Aggregator — a third-party tracker. See why you should not trust a holdings aggregator; these are demonstrably unreliable.
- Press report — reported by a news outlet, not seen by us in the original document.
- Our inference — arithmetic or reasoning of ours, clearly flagged as such and never presented as disclosure.
Dollar figures come from US filings and market reports and are left in dollars. Yen, euro, Hong Kong dollar, Canadian dollar and Swedish krona figures come from the filings of issuers reporting in those currencies. We have converted nothing, because a silent conversion hides the exchange rate and the date it was struck.
The names and tickers keep moving
This is the sector's defining reporting hazard. At least a dozen companies in this cohort changed identity between mid-2025 and mid-2026, and in most cases the ticker did not change with the name, or changed without the name changing:
- KindlyMD became Nakamoto Inc on 21 January 2026 (NAKA).
- Asset Entities became Strive, Inc. (still ASST).
- LM Funding America became PowerCompute on 22 July 2026 (LMFA became PWCM).
- Volcon, an electric powersports manufacturer, became Empery Digital (EMPD).
- The Blockchain Group became Capital B (ALCPB).
- WeTrade Group became Next Technology Holding (NXTT).
- Bitfarms Ltd became Keel Infrastructure Corp and redomiciled from Ontario to Delaware effective 1 April 2026; BITF became KEEL, and the old Ontario subsidiary was renamed Backbone Hosting Solutions Inc on 15 June 2026.
- Cipher Mining Inc became Cipher Digital Inc — same ticker, CIFR.
- Helius Medical Technologies became Solana Company but kept HSDT, a ticker that reflects a neurostimulation-device past.
- SRM Entertainment, a maker of theme-park souvenirs, became Tron Inc (TRON) — and still makes the souvenirs.
- Block's ticker changed from SQ to XYZ.
- 180 Life Sciences became ETHZilla in August 2025 and then Forum Markets in February 2026 — three identities in nineteen months.
Any article about "Bitfarms", "Cipher Mining" or "Asset Entities" written before 2026 describes an entity that no longer carries that name. Start from the registrant, not the brand: the section on how to verify any of this yourself shows how.
Where the sector stood on 26 August 2026
Start here, because it reframes everything below. Every holdings figure on this page sits inside a bear phase, and the financing mechanism that built this sector had stopped working for most of it by the snapshot date.
The price path behind every figure
- Bitcoin peaked around $126,000 in October 2025. Market data.
- It closed 30 June 2026 at $58,532. That is not a quote we looked up — it is the price Nakamoto Inc used to mark its own balance sheet in its Form 10-Q filed 13 August 2026, so it is a filed fact.
- It traded at about $78,986 on 26 August 2026, the date of this snapshot. Market data.
- Core Scientific's Form 10-Q filed 28 July 2026 gives the fullest filed context: bitcoin ranged from a low of $58,097 to a high of $97,877 in the six months to 30 June 2026, averaging $74,142. Filed fact.
Even the "same" 30 June 2026 price is not identical across filings: MARA and CleanSpark both marked at $58,524 per bitcoin, HIVE at $58,237, Keel at approximately $58,600, and Nakamoto at $58,532. Those are all filed facts, from four different pricing sources. If four audited filers cannot agree on a price to the nearest hundred dollars, treat any single sector-wide dollar total with suspicion.
That round trip — roughly $126,000 down to $58,532 and back to about $79,000 — is the single most important fact for reading anything below. It is what turned the treasury model from a self-reinforcing machine into a forced-seller problem, and almost every wind-down on this page is downstream of it.
What the market was paying for the coin pile
mNAV is the ratio of a company's market value to the value of the tokens it holds. Above 1.0 the market pays a premium for the wrapper; below 1.0 you can buy the coins inside the company for less than they are worth on an exchange — assuming you could ever get at them, which you cannot. We explain the arithmetic and its traps in mNAV explained.
The table below is aggregator data on an enterprise-value basis — the bitcointreasuries.net leaderboard, retrieved 26 August 2026. It is not filed, it is not audited, and different aggregators compute it differently — particularly where preferred stock sits ahead of the common shares and should be deducted first. Read it as a picture of a distribution, not as ten precise numbers.
| Company | Ticker | mNAV, enterprise-value basis, 26 Aug 2026 | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strive, Inc. | ASST | 1.45 | Premium — can still issue shares accretively |
| Strategy Inc | MSTR | 1.01 | Effectively at par |
| Metaplanet Inc. | 3350 | 0.90 | Discount |
| Nakamoto Inc. | NAKA | 0.85 | Discount |
| OranjeBTC | — | 0.80 | Discount |
| Twenty One Capital, Inc. | XXI | 0.77 | Discount |
| Bitcoin Treasury Corp | — | 0.64 | Deep discount |
| Capital B | ALCPB | 0.59 | Deep discount |
| DDC Enterprise Limited | DDC | 0.45 | Deep discount |
| USBC | — | 0.09 | The wrapper is valued at almost nothing |
The basis moves the number more than the date does. Strategy's 1.01 above is the enterprise-value figure. The same tracker showed Strategy at 0.74x on a basic basis on 25 August 2026 — 27 points apart, one day earlier, from one source: on one basis the company sits at a premium, on the other at a discount. Every ratio in the table carries the same ambiguity, so a bare "mNAV" number with no basis attached is not a fact you can use. We set out which basis does what, and why they diverge, in mNAV explained.
Two non-bitcoin comparators, for scale: Sharplink showed an mNAV of about 0.81 in August 2026 (aggregator), and Forward Industries disclosed its own fully diluted mNAV of 0.908x at 30 June 2026 (company statement — it publishes the figure itself, which is unusually transparent, and it published it at a discount).
Why below 1.0 changes everything. When the shares trade above the value of the coins per share, selling new shares and buying coins leaves every existing holder with more coins per share. That is the flywheel, and it genuinely worked in 2024 and 2025. When the shares trade below that value, the same action destroys coins per share: you are selling a claim on coins for less than the coins are worth in order to buy coins. The accumulation engine does not merely slow down — running it actively harms the people it is supposed to benefit.
How does the flywheel run in reverse?
The model these companies copied has three legs: issue equity above the value of the coins per share; use the proceeds to buy more coins than the dilution cost; repeat. The mechanism in full, including how it is supposed to work, is set out in how digital asset treasury companies actually work. What follows is the reverse gear, which promotional material routinely omits.
Leg one is load-bearing
Remove the premium and only three levers remain: borrow, sell coins, or stop. All three are visible in the filings.
Stop. Twenty One Capital held 43,514 bitcoin at 30 June 2026 against 43,515 at 31 December 2025 — it acquired net minus one bitcoin in the first half of 2026, despite being marketed as a bitcoin accumulation vehicle (filed fact, Form 10-Q filed 11 August 2026). The company's own key-performance table shows bitcoin per share falling from 12,557 to 12,547 satoshis over the same period. The engine did not just stall; the metric it exists to grow went backwards.
Sell. Strategy, which spent five years telling the market it would not sell, sold 1,690 bitcoin in the week of 3–9 August 2026 at an average of $64,262 — below its own stated average purchase price of $75,385 — and used the net proceeds to fund repurchases of its STRC preferred stock, per the filing's own footnote (Form 8-K, 10 August 2026). Filed fact. That is a company selling the asset below cost to defend the price of the paper it issued to buy the asset.
Buy back the shares instead. Once the discount opens, the accretive move flips from issuing stock to retiring it — and buybacks need cash, which in a company with no operating profit means selling tokens. Forum Markets (then ETHZilla) retired about 7.1 million shares, roughly 35% of its share count, at a $4.42 average in the second quarter of 2026, having funded earlier buybacks by selling ether; its chairman said the firm would keep selling ether "until the discount to NAV is normalized" (press report of a company statement). Empery Digital repurchased 26.2 million shares for $149.7m, cutting shares outstanding from 33,800,951 at 31 December 2025 to 28,110,111 at 30 June 2026 — funded by selling the bitcoin it was created to accumulate (filed fact, Form 10-Q filed 7 August 2026). Sharplink did both inside one quarter: a $75.0m registered direct offering at $7.49 on 23 June 2026, which the company stated was at a premium to net asset value, and about 2.1 million shares repurchased at roughly $4.70 (filed fact, Form 8-K Exhibit 99.1 filed 10 August 2026).
A company trading at a discount to its own tokens is structurally a seller of those tokens. That is the reverse gear, and it operates regardless of what anybody believes about the long-run price of the asset.
Dilution without selling a single coin
The most under-reported failure mode in this sector is not selling the asset. It is holding the asset while the share count explodes.
Next Technology Holding held approximately 5,833 bitcoin at 31 December 2025 and the identical 5,833 bitcoin at 30 June 2026 — nothing bought, nothing sold. Over the same six months, shares outstanding went from 4,882,556 to 147,296,192. Both figures come from the same Form 10-Q, filed 24 July 2026 (filed fact). A 1-for-100 reverse split followed on 10 August 2026 (press report), on top of a 1-for-200 reverse split in September 2025. Published analysis puts bitcoin per share falling from roughly 204,000 satoshis to roughly 4,000 (press report) — a destruction of about 98% of a holder's claim on the treasury, with the treasury untouched.
Reverse splits cluster in this sector because Nasdaq requires a $1.00 minimum bid price, and they cluster hardest around the companies whose coins per share have already been destroyed. Nakamoto executed a 1-for-40 reverse split on 22 May 2026 after a 10 December 2025 non-compliance notice, regaining compliance on 9 June 2026, and had only 17,894,943 shares outstanding at 10 August 2026 (filed fact, Form 10-Q filed 13 August 2026). PowerCompute executed a 1-for-25 effective 13 July 2026, leaving 1,794,135 shares outstanding at 11 August 2026 (filed fact, Form 10-Q filed 14 August 2026). American Bitcoin did a 1-for-15 effective 2 July 2026 (filed fact).
Two reverse splits inside twelve months is, by itself, the signal. You do not need a view on bitcoin to read it.
Collateral mechanics in a drawdown
Borrowing against the coins converts a price fall into a forced sale, on a schedule set by somebody else. Two filings disclose the thresholds precisely enough to be worth memorising.
Empery Digital's borrowing arrangements, permitting up to $150.0m: initial collateral of 250% of borrowings, a collateral call at 175%, excess returned above 345%, and a liquidation level at 150% at which the company must top up within 24 hours or the lender may liquidate. The Form 10-Q filed 7 August 2026 records those thresholds actually being breached and the terms renegotiated twice in 2026, after bitcoin fell on 4 February and again on 3 June. Filed fact.
Hut 8's FalconX term loan: $200.0m principal at 7.0% fixed, maturing 30 April 2027, secured on bitcoin in a segregated custody account, with an initial collateral ratio of 143%, a margin call at 130% and liquidation at 105% (filed fact, Form 10-Q filed 4 August 2026). Show a reader those three numbers and the risk stops being abstract: below a certain price, a third party sells 4,850 bitcoin, at the worst possible moment, and the shareholder has no vote.
Nakamoto's Kraken facility is the same shape in different words. Its Form 10-Q filed 13 August 2026 discloses that approximately $222.7m of its bitcoin is subject to a contractual sale restriction running to the loan maturities, and that below the liquidation threshold Kraken "may liquidate the pledged Bitcoin". The risk factors say it plainly: margin or collateral calls "could require the forced liquidation of Bitcoin holdings at unfavorable prices". Filed fact.
How do these companies pay for the coins?
The funding method decides how a company behaves when the price falls, so it tells you more than the headline holding does. Five distinct forms appear in this cohort, in roughly ascending order of how quickly somebody else can force the company's hand.
1. At-the-market equity — the default engine
Continuous issuance of ordinary shares straight into the market. Strategy sold $2,006.5m of stock in the week to 23 August 2026 (aggregator roll-up of its weekly Form 8-K disclosures — open the filing itself before quoting it). Strive funds its buying through an at-the-market sales agreement, PIPE warrants and its STRC preferred instrument (filed fact, Form 10-Q filed 10 August 2026). Sharplink raised $75.0m in a registered direct offering at $7.49 on 23 June 2026, which it stated was struck at a premium to net asset value, and its share count rose from 196,707,797 at 31 December 2025 to 216,983,308 at 30 June 2026 — about 10% dilution in six months (filed facts).
An at-the-market programme carries no forced-sale trigger, which is why it is the least dangerous form. But it is only accretive while the shares trade above the value of the coins per share, it dilutes relentlessly, and the share count does not shrink when the premium disappears.
2. Preferred stock — a cash obligation that does not care about the coin price
Strategy's stack of perpetual preferreds (STRK, STRF, STRD, STRC and STRE) is the template, and others have copied it. Metaplanet disclosed ¥23.6bn notional of MERCURY Class B preferred at 30 June 2026, issued but unlisted with no public trading market, alongside a MARS Class A preferred that is shelf-registered and not yet issued (company statement, Q2 2026 earnings presentation, 13 August 2026). Strive has a separate preferred line, SATA; BitMine's Series A preferred trades separately as BMNP.
The mechanism to understand is that preferred dividends are a cash cost, and bitcoin sitting in cold storage generates nothing to pay them. If the operating business does not generate that cash — and in most of these companies there barely is an operating business — the money has to come from issuing more securities or from selling coins. Strategy's August 2026 sale of bitcoin below its own average purchase price to fund STRC repurchases, described in the section above, is that obligation reaching back into the coin pile. It also matters for anyone reading an mNAV figure: preferred stock sits ahead of the ordinary shares and must be deducted before any net-asset-value-per-share calculation, which is one reason different trackers publish different mNAVs for the same company.
3. Convertible notes and coin-backed loans — where the margin call lives
This is the form that converts a price fall into a forced sale on somebody else's schedule.
- Twenty One Capital: $486.5m of convertible notes issued at closing, conversion price $10 at a 130% premium, effective interest 1.09%, secured on approximately 16,116 bitcoin (filed fact, Form 10-Q filed 11 August 2026).
- Nakamoto: the Kraken "June Loan" of 5 June 2026 — a fee of 7.75% a year while at least 2,000 bitcoin sits in a designated yield-strategy trading wallet and 8.00% below that, initial collateral of 3,805 bitcoin, partial maturity 4 December 2026 with the remainder on 30 June 2027, and a liquidation threshold at which Kraken may sell the pledged coin (filed fact, Form 10-Q filed 13 August 2026).
- DeFi Development Corp: repurchased $3.5m of principal of its July 2030 convertible notes for $2.3m cash — a 35% discount to par, which tells you where its own paper trades (company statement, 12 August 2026).
- Sequans: the completed version. Convertibles issued in July 2025 and collateralised by the bitcoin itself; when bitcoin fell, the collateral position became the binding constraint and roughly 80% of the stack was sold to redeem the debt (filed fact).
The thresholds disclosed by Empery Digital and Hut 8 — set out under collateral mechanics in a drawdown — are what these arrangements look like from the inside.
4. Debt with nothing pledged — a different risk, not a smaller one
Metaplanet's "BitBonds" are yen-denominated senior unsecured bonds: an inaugural ¥200m across series 21–24 at 4.0–4.3%, roughly three-year, by private placement (company statement, disclosed 13 August 2026). No bitcoin is pledged, so there is no margin mechanic and no liquidation trigger — buyers take Metaplanet credit risk instead. Its wider stack at 30 June 2026: ¥77.3bn of debt (a ¥67.5bn senior credit facility, ¥8.0bn of unsecured senior notes and ¥1.8bn of other), total debt plus preferred of ¥100.9bn, an equity ratio of 81.4%, and a self-calculated "coverage" of 4.1x which the company states is not a credit rating. The distribution arrangement — the issuer selling its own paper through its own broker subsidiary — is described under two rows that are not what they look like.
5. Coins contributed in kind, rather than bought
The least understood form, and the one most likely to be misread as an achievement. No cash changes hands: the company issues securities and receives tokens.
- Twenty One Capital was assembled this way. Tether contributed 24,500 bitcoin and Bitfinex 7,000 under a contribution agreement, with further PIPE bitcoin on top — including 4,812.22 BTC of "Initial PIPE Bitcoin" at $458.7m and a 1,381.16 BTC "June PIPE" at about $147.5m (filed fact).
- Next Technology Holding issued 135,171,078 shares plus 294,117,647 nominal-exercise-price warrants on 12 March 2025 as consideration for 5,000 bitcoin — a share-for-bitcoin swap, which is also why the acquisition value is hard to verify independently (filed fact).
- H100 acquired Norwegian bitcoin-holding companies holding 2,455 BTC by issuing 790.5 million new shares, with no cash consideration (press report). That is accretive to total coins and dilutive per share at the same time, and whether existing holders gain depends entirely on the exchange ratio against the mNAV of both sides — the calculation almost nobody does.
- Empery Digital paid $28.0m of a roughly $501.0m raise in bitcoin — 235.8 coins (filed fact). GameSquare bought a CryptoPunk for $5.15m in preferred shares rather than cash (press report).
- And the version with a liability attached. Alpha Compute's TON treasury was seeded by Animoca Brands affiliates with put options attached — options the contributors could exercise against the company, which makes an apparently equity-funded treasury a debt-like obligation. On the July 2026 wind-down the tokens went back to the contributors and the put liabilities were extinguished. Outside shareholders received nothing (company statement, 10 July 2026).
The question to ask of any treasury announcement is not how many coins, but whether they were bought or contributed, and on what terms. A contribution can bring a counterparty with a claim, a control block, or an option to hand the tokens back at a price of their choosing.
The running cost nobody advertises
Holding is not free. Strive's general and administrative expenses rose 268% year on year in the first half of 2026 on custody fees, insurance and listing costs (filed fact, Form 10-Q filed 10 August 2026). Sol Strategies held cash of just $0.37m against payables of $1.77m at 31 March 2026, with continued operation explicitly reliant on its crypto holdings, credit facilities and capital markets access (filed fact). PowerCompute's Form 10-Q filed 14 August 2026 carries a going-concern discussion against approximately $854 thousand of available cash. When the equity window closes, those bills are still due, and the only asset that can pay them is the one the company exists to hold.
What does "coins held" actually mean?
A headline holdings figure is not a claim on unencumbered assets. "Holds X bitcoin" and "owns X bitcoin free and clear" are different statements, and the filings distinguish them where the press releases do not. As at the dates shown:
| Company | Headline | Encumbered | Free | As at / source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nakamoto Inc. (NAKA) | 4,467 BTC | 3,805 (85%) | 662 | 30 Jun 2026 — Form 10-Q filed 13 Aug 2026. Filed fact. Pledged to Kraken. |
| Empery Digital (EMPD) | 1,279 BTC | 954 (75%) | 325 | 6 Aug 2026 — Form 10-Q filed 7 Aug 2026. Filed fact. |
| Sequans (SQNS) | 1,514 BTC | 1,217 (80%) | 297 | 31 Mar 2026 — Q1 2026 disclosure. Filed fact. Stack largely sold by 30 Jun 2026. |
| Twenty One Capital (XXI) | 43,514 BTC | ~16,116 (37%) | ~27,398 | 30 Jun 2026 — Form 10-Q filed 11 Aug 2026. Filed fact. Secures $486.5m of convertible notes. |
| PowerCompute (PWCM) | 144.6 BTC on the bitcoin line | 174 BTC derecognised entirely | see note | 30 Jun 2026 — Form 10-Q filed 14 Aug 2026. Filed fact. |
The convertible notes secured on Twenty One's bitcoin are described in its own filing as leaving those coins "not available for general corporate purposes or liquidity needs while serving as collateral". That is the point. Encumbered coins are pre-committed to a lender under a margin mechanic; they are not a liquidity buffer, and in a stress they are the first thing to go.
When your bitcoin leaves your own balance sheet
There is a worse version, and almost nobody reports it. If the lender is permitted to rehypothecate — to re-lend or sell the collateral — then under US accounting the borrower has given up control, must derecognise the bitcoin altogether, and instead books a receivable from the lender. The asset stops being bitcoin and becomes a claim on a counterparty.
Cipher Digital states the mechanic in its own words in its Form 10-Q filed 4 August 2026: borrowings under its Coinbase overnight facility are "collateralized by bitcoin transferred to the Lending Service Provider's platform. Since the lender has the right to rehypothecate the bitcoin held as collateral, the Company derecognizes the bitcoin transferred." Filed fact. Cipher happened to be undrawn at 30 June 2026, so the risk was dormant at the balance sheet date — but the facility remains available.
PowerCompute is the live version: 174 bitcoin (145 at 31 December 2025) pledged under its Galaxy loan facility are derecognised from the bitcoin balance and sit in "Digital assets receivable", with a fair value of approximately $10.2m securing about $11m of borrowings. The headline balance-sheet bitcoin number is 144.6; total economic exposure is roughly 319 (our inference from the two disclosed lines). CleanSpark runs the same mechanic in reverse direction: its bitcoin line says 12,205 BTC, but a separate "Receivable from bitcoin collateral" line holds another 1,719 BTC ($100.6m) posted to derivative counterparties where control transferred, so economic exposure is 13,924 (filed facts, Form 10-Q filed 6 August 2026; the 13,924 total is our inference).
The lesson is blunt: your bitcoin can leave your balance sheet without you selling it. When you read a holdings figure, find out whether it counts the receivable line, and whether the coins behind it can be re-lent by somebody else.
Global bitcoin treasury companies outside the UK
The table covers the significant non-UK names, with the holding, the date it was struck, the document it came from, and the funding method — because the funding method determines how the company behaves in a fall, and it matters more than the headline holding. Companies whose coin is mined rather than bought sit in the miners section, and operating companies that hold alongside a real business sit in corporates are not treasury companies.
| Company (ticker, venue) | Holding and as-at date | Evidence | How it is funded | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strategy Inc (MSTR, Nasdaq) | 840,447 BTC, 23 Aug 2026 | Filed fact — Form 8-K filed 24 Aug 2026, holdings stated as at 23 Aug 2026; aggregate purchase price $63.36bn, average cost $75,385 per bitcoin. Freshness note: Strategy discloses weekly, so open the latest 8-K before using this figure. | At-the-market equity plus a stack of perpetual preferreds (STRK, STRF, STRD, STRC, STRE). Sold $2,006.5m of stock — 18,261,118 shares in the week to 23 Aug 2026 (filed fact, the same Form 8-K filed 24 Aug 2026). | Active, and now also selling — see the 10 Aug 2026 Form 8-K linked above |
| Metaplanet Inc. (3350, Tokyo Stock Exchange Standard Market; also OTCQX: MTPLF) | 43,000 BTC, 30 Jun 2026 | Company statement — Q2 2026 Earnings Presentation dated 13 Aug 2026, footnoted "As of June 30, 2026"; reaffirmed in the company's release of 18 Aug 2026 | ¥77.3bn of debt (a ¥67.5bn senior credit facility, ¥8.0bn unsecured notes, ¥1.8bn other), ¥23.6bn of unlisted MERCURY preferred, equity and warrants, plus new yen "BitBonds" — an inaugural ¥200m at 4.0–4.3%, senior unsecured, no bitcoin pledged | Active |
| Twenty One Capital, Inc. (XXI, NYSE) | 43,514 BTC, 30 Jun 2026 (fair value $2,550,162,413); ~16,116 pledged | Filed fact — Note 6, Form 10-Q filed 11 Aug 2026 | Bitcoin contributed in kind by Tether (24,500 BTC) and Bitfinex (7,000 BTC) plus PIPE bitcoin; $486.5m of convertible notes secured on the coin. Dual class: Class A has economics and effectively no votes. | Active, but bought net zero in H1 2026 |
| Strive, Inc. (ASST, Nasdaq; preferred SATA) | 20,167 BTC, 7 Aug 2026 (19,864 BTC at 30 Jun 2026, fair value ~$1.2bn) | Filed fact — MD&A, Form 10-Q filed 10 Aug 2026 | At-the-market equity, PIPE warrants, the STRC preferred instrument, an inherited $100m Semler convertible note and a Coinbase loan. Also runs an asset-management business. | Active — the sector consolidator, and one of the very few above 1.0 mNAV |
| Next Technology Holding Inc. (NXTT, Nasdaq) | ~5,833 BTC, 30 Jun 2026 (carrying value ~$351,509,806); identical count at 31 Dec 2025 | Filed fact, but not independently corroborated — Form 10-Q filed 24 Jul 2026. We found no proof-of-reserves or auditor attestation. | Not cash. On 12 Mar 2025 it issued 135,171,078 shares plus 294,117,647 nominal-price warrants as consideration to acquire 5,000 bitcoin — a share-for-bitcoin swap. | Active — treat as a red-flag case study, not a peer of Metaplanet or Strive |
| Boyaa Interactive International (0434, Main Board, Hong Kong) | ~4,093 BTC, 31 Mar 2026, average cost ~US$68,211; ~4,201 BTC, ~10 Jul 2026 | 31 Mar figure is a filed fact — HKEX Q1 2026 results announcement. The July figure is a press report. | Shareholder acquisition mandates and equity placings, on top of a genuinely cash-generative online games business (Q1 2026 game revenue HK$130.6m, +20.2%) | Active — but see the note below; a large slice is not a passive treasury |
| Nakamoto Inc. (NAKA, Nasdaq Capital Market) | 4,467 BTC, 30 Jun 2026; 3,805 pledged to Kraken, ~662 free | Filed fact — Note 4, Form 10-Q filed 13 Aug 2026 | PIPE equity plus a bitcoin-collateralised Kraken loan at 7.75–8.00%, maturing in tranches on 4 Dec 2026 and 30 Jun 2027. Also owns BTC Inc (the Bitcoin Conference) and UTXO Management. | Active, distressed — cost basis ~$528.2m against ~$261.7m fair value |
| Bitcoin Group SE (ADE, Deutsche Börse Open Market / Scale) | 3,605 BTC, August 2026 (exact date not established) | Aggregator — not verified against a company report or German regulatory filing. Treat as indicative. | Accumulated over a decade from an operating exchange business (futurum bank AG / Bitcoin.de), not from leveraged issuance | Active — a contrast case that does not depend on the mNAV flywheel |
| H100 Group AB (H100, Nasdaq First North Growth Market, Stockholm) | 3,506 BTC, August 2026, after an all-share acquisition of Norwegian bitcoin-holding companies holding 2,455 BTC | Press report — not verified against H100's own Swedish regulatory announcement | Equity issuance, and acquisition in kind: the Norwegian deal involved no cash, with 790.5 million new shares issued to the sellers | Active |
| Capital B (ALCPB, Euronext Growth Paris) | 3,145 BTC for a cumulative €284.2m, 17 Aug 2026 | Filed fact — company regulatory release distributed via Euronext/Actusnews | Convertible bonds and equity. Fully converted its B-01 bonds, held by Blockstream Capital Partners, into 28,687,362 new shares at €0.495. | Active — mNAV 0.59, so every new share issued destroys bitcoin per share |
| DDC Enterprise Limited (DDC, NYSE American) | 2,899 BTC, average cost ~$78,204, during 2026 — exact as-at date not established (1,183 BTC at 31 Dec 2025) | Press report / aggregator — we could not tie this to a Form 6-K. Do not rely on it without pulling the filing. | Equity issuance and PIPE financing alongside an Asian consumer food business | Active — mNAV 0.45, the most vivid discount in the sector |
| Empery Digital Inc. (EMPD, Nasdaq; formerly Volcon) | 1,279 BTC, 6 Aug 2026, of which 954 restricted by lenders — 325 free | Filed fact — MD&A, Form 10-Q filed 7 Aug 2026 | Raised ~$501.0m gross including $28.0m paid in bitcoin (235.8 BTC); two bitcoin-collateralised borrowing arrangements up to $150.0m | Pivoting away — selling bitcoin to fund buybacks and data-centre investments |
| KULR Technology Group (KULR, NYSE American) | ~760 BTC, 23 Jul 2026 | Filed fact — Form 8-K filed 24 Jul 2026 | Was an ATM programme plus a $20.0m Coinbase Credit facility secured on 565.00 BTC, and leased mining rigs. That stack has been dismantled. | Pivoted — exited mining, repaid the facility in full, reducing holdings deliberately |
| Sequans Communications S.A. (SQNS, NYSE, ADSs) | 314 BTC, 30 Jun 2026 (market value $18.4m), all unrestricted — from 1,514 BTC at 31 Mar 2026 | Filed fact — Q2 2026 earnings release furnished on Form 6-K | Was convertible debt issued July 2025, collateralised by the bitcoin itself. Fully redeemed; the company is now debt-free. | Wound down — its own risk factors list "our planned exit from our Bitcoin treasury strategy" |
| PowerCompute, Inc. (PWCM, Nasdaq; formerly LM Funding America) | 144.6 BTC on balance sheet at 30 Jun 2026, plus 174 BTC derecognised into a receivable | Filed fact — Note 2, Form 10-Q filed 14 Aug 2026 | Equity plus a Galaxy loan facility with rehypothecation rights; self-mining through US Digital Mining and Hosting Co | Pivoted to HPC/AI — and carries a going-concern discussion, with ~$854 thousand of available cash at 30 Jun 2026 |
| Bitdeer Technologies Group (BTDR, Nasdaq) | Corporate HODL treasury to zero, 20 Feb 2026. Separately, US$196.9m of digital assets and receivables at 30 Jun 2026 — working inventory, not a treasury. | Zero-treasury claim is a press report of the company's weekly update. The US$196.9m is a filed fact (Form 6-K filed 10 Aug 2026). | Not a treasury funder — a miner and mining-hardware business. $325m of 5.00% convertibles closed 24 Feb 2026; US$1.8bn of borrowings at 30 Jun 2026. | Pivoted to AI data centres — should not be presented as bitcoin exposure |
| Genius Group Limited (GNS, NYSE American) | Zero BTC, 1 Apr 2026 (from a peak of about 440 BTC in February 2025) | Filed fact — Q1 2026 results release furnished on Form 6-K, 1 Apr 2026 | Was equity raises and ATM issuance — which a New York court injunction cut off | Wound down — still describing itself as a "Bitcoin-first education group" |
| Prenetics Global Limited (PRE, Nasdaq) | Zero BTC — board authorised divestment of the entire ~510 BTC on 1 May 2026, targeted complete by 14 May 2026 | Filed fact — Form 6-K furnished 4 May 2026 | Bitcoin had been bought from balance-sheet cash, with no debt — which is why the exit was orderly rather than forced | Wound down, permanently — board policy adopted that it "will not purchase Bitcoin or any other digital assets in the future" |
| Semler Scientific, Inc. (SMLR — no longer trades) | 5,048.1 BTC transferred to Strive on completion, 16 Jan 2026 | Filed fact — Strive/Semler merger documents; Semler filed Form 15-12G on 26 Jan 2026 to deregister | Was operating cash flow from its QuantaFlo medical-device business, an ATM programme and a $100m convertible note | Acquired and delisted — its EDGAR entity record (CIK 0001554859) now carries no tickers and no exchanges |
| Bitcoin Standard Treasury / BSTR (never traded; SPAC listed as CEPO) | Listed by trackers at 30,021 BTC and ranked fifth among public companies as at 26 Aug 2026 | Aggregator — and wrong. There is no listed entity and no filed holdings statement. The SPAC merger was terminated on 20 Aug 2026. | Was to be a SPAC merger with Cantor Equity Partners I with up to $1.5bn of PIPE financing. None of it completed. | Never listed. Under the Termination and Release Agreement, BSTR or Blockstream Capital Partners agreed to pay CEPO $15,000,000 — $10m by 19 Sep 2026 and $5m by 1 Dec 2026 (filed fact, Form 8-K, 20 Aug 2026) |
Two rows that are not what they look like
Boyaa is not a passive treasury. Its own HKEX announcement says so. As at 31 March 2026, 1,000 BTC was committed to staking on the MTT Network, 500 BTC was deployed as cross-chain bridge liquidity in the YAAKO Wallet with about 500 more earmarked, and 100 BTC was put up as tournament prize funds, of which 77% had already been consumed — 13 BTC of it in the first quarter alone. Roughly 1,600 of about 4,100 coins are working capital in a Web3 venture, and one tranche is being spent, not held. Filed fact. Its custody arrangements, through Coinbase Prime, OSL Exchange and HashKey Exchange with bankruptcy-isolation trust structures, are better disclosed than most of the sector.
Metaplanet distributes its own bonds through its own broker. The company discloses this itself: BitBonds are sold to Japanese investors through Metaplanet Securities Inc., a Type I Financial Instruments Business Operator that is Metaplanet's own subsidiary, acquired as Siiibo Securities in June 2026 for approximately ¥2.1bn and renamed on 13 July 2026. The presentation says conflicts are "appropriately managed". Filed fact. Separately, on 18 August 2026 Metaplanet agreed to contribute 2,100 BTC — about 4.9% of its stack — plus $2.5m of cash to Nasdaq-listed Super League Enterprise, taking about 95.7% of the common stock. Because it retains 95.7%, this is a structuring exercise, not a disposal, and it should not be read as a sale. Two large August 2026 coin movements, including 1,000 BTC to Coinbase Prime on 25 August 2026, remained unresolved at our snapshot date; the CEO denied a reported $320m sale. Do not adopt an interpretation before the next holdings disclosure settles it.
How big is the sector, really?
The most-cited aggregate, retrieved 26 August 2026, is 197 public companies holding 1,265,440 BTC, roughly 6.0% of the 21 million cap, with Strategy alone accounting for 840,447 BTC — 66.4% of the public-company total. Strategy's own number is a filed fact (Form 8-K filed 24 August 2026, holdings as at 23 August 2026); the total it sits inside is not. A dated cross-check from Bitwise put it at 174 public companies and 1,187,898 BTC as at 12 May 2026 (press report).
Both figures are aggregator roll-ups, and the larger one is demonstrably defective. We could not reconcile it to primary sources because it is not built from any. It includes:
- BSTR at 30,021 BTC — a company that never listed, whose merger died on 20 August 2026. That is 2.4% of the entire reported public-company total.
- SpaceX at 18,712 BTC — a private company, not a public company at all.
- Exchanges and custodians whose coin is a different animal entirely: Bullish 23,800, Coinbase 17,311, Gemini 5,528, BitGo 2,523.
- Miners' working inventory, which is produced and sold rather than accumulated.
- At least one stale entity: "LM Funding America, LMFA, 334 BTC" — an entity that has been called PowerCompute since 22 July 2026 and reported 144.6 BTC on balance sheet at 30 June 2026.
Strip out the non-listed, the exchanges and the miners and the genuine treasury-company universe is materially smaller than 197. There is also a consolidation problem that nobody has quantified, and it needs stating in two parts rather than one. The filed part: American Bitcoin's 8,002 coins are consolidated into Hut 8's 17,316 (filed fact, Hut 8 Form 10-Q filed 4 Aug 2026), so anyone who adds the two published headline totals together counts those coins twice. Whether the leaderboard itself does that is unresolved: it carries Hut 8 at 10,278, which is close to the 9,314 corporate-level residual we derive in the miners section — consistent with the tracker already showing Hut 8 excluding American Bitcoin rather than double-counting it. We could not confirm which, so we are not asserting a double-count here. Separately, Metaplanet's 2,100 BTC contribution creates a second listed entity holding coin Metaplanet still controls; Nakamoto holds an investment in Treasury B.V., another treasury vehicle. Our inference: any "corporate bitcoin" total you see is an editorial choice about consolidation dressed up as a measurement.
Non-bitcoin treasuries, and what staking actually does
A bitcoin treasury holds an inert asset. Its only levers are issuing stock above net asset value, borrowing, and selling. A proof-of-stake treasury has a fourth lever: the asset produces a protocol-level return. That single difference is the entire pitch for this half of the sector, and it is the half most often misdescribed.
| Company (ticker, venue) | Token | Holding and as-at date | Evidence | Status and note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR, NYSE; preferred BMNP) | ETH (plus 210 BTC) | 5,847,611 ETH, 23 Aug 2026 2:00pm ET, of which 5,067,309 staked. Filed comparator: 5,805,238 ETH at 9 Aug 2026, same 5,067,309 staked. | 23 Aug figure is a company statement (press release, 24 Aug 2026). The 9 Aug figure is a filed fact (Form 8-K Ex-99.1, 10 Aug 2026). | Active. Largest ETH treasury; states it holds 4.8% of ETH supply against a 5% goal. Running a $4bn buyback. |
| Sharplink, Inc. (SBET, Nasdaq) | ETH, including LsETH and weETH | 888,938 ETH, 3 Aug 2026 — 634,255 native plus 181,748 "as-if redeemed" from LsETH plus 72,935 from weETH. 886,881 ETH at 30 Jun 2026. | Filed fact — Form 8-K Exhibit 99.1 filed 10 Aug 2026, accession 0001493152-26-036741 | Active. No debt. Roughly 29% of the headline is a liquid-staking or restaking wrapper, not ether. |
| Forward Industries, Inc. (FWDI, Nasdaq — ticker was FORD) | SOL | 7,552,698 SOL, 30 Jun 2026. NAV $481,328,023; NAV per share $4.65; fully diluted mNAV 0.908x. | Company statement — its own SOL treasury disclosure page and release of 1 Jul 2026 | Active. Largest Solana treasury. Discloses 6.73% gross validator APY before fees — the qualifier usually dropped in coverage. |
| DeFi Development Corp. (DFDV, Nasdaq; formerly Janover) | SOL | 2,311,523 SOL, 12 Aug 2026. SOL per share 0.066. | Company statement — Q2 2026 results release, 12 Aug 2026 | Active, retrenching — discontinued its Treasury Accelerator programme and is concentrating on fewer protocols. Has July 2030 convertible notes; repurchased $3.5m of principal for $2.3m cash, a 35% discount to par. |
| Upexi, Inc. (UPXI, Nasdaq) | SOL | ~2.4 million SOL, 30 Jun 2026. No primary August 2026 figure exists. | Company statement — Blueprint staking partnership announcement, 30 Jun 2026. Secondary sources conflict on earlier dates. | Active. Its IR page published nothing after 30 Jun 2026 — a gap worth noting in itself. |
| Sharps Technology, Inc. (STSS, Nasdaq) | SOL | Over 2.0 million SOL, fair value $162.5m, 31 Mar 2026 — from $250.1m at 31 Dec 2025 on a broadly flat token count | Filed fact — Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 31 Mar 2026 | Active. Evidence that mid-size holders do sell: a realised loss of $10.8m in Q1 2026 means actual disposals at a loss. The treasury is funding the company. |
| SOL Strategies Inc. (STKE, Nasdaq; HODL, Canadian Securities Exchange) | SOL; also runs SUI validators | Owned: ~524,000 SOL (~C$60.6m), 31 Mar 2026. Assets under delegation: 3.8m SOL (~C$453m) — not owned by the company. | Filed fact — Q2 FY2026 results (quarter ended 31 Mar 2026), SEDAR+ and Form 6-K | Active, but not primarily a treasury: its economics come from validator commission on third-party stake. Cash of $0.37m against payables of $1.77m at 31 Mar 2026. |
| Hyperliquid Strategies Inc. (PURR, Nasdaq) | HYPE | 29.2 million HYPE, ~$1.7bn, 30 Jul 2026. Filed starting position: 12.5m HYPE plus $300m cash at closing, 2 Dec 2025. | The 30 Jul figure is a press report. The starting position is a filed fact. | Active. Stated objective to stake 100% of its HYPE — see the lock-up arithmetic below. |
| Tron Inc. (TRON, Nasdaq; formerly SRM Entertainment) | TRX | 711.2 million TRX, roughly $245m, 24 Aug 2026. Company's own 8-K of 13 Aug 2026: "more than 709 million TRX". | Filed fact — company regulatory filings, 24 Aug 2026 and Form 8-K Ex-99.1, 13 Aug 2026 | Active. Buying roughly $50,000 of TRX per day under a disclosed 360-day plan. Still manufactures theme-park souvenirs. |
| CEA Industries Inc. (BNC, Nasdaq) | BNB | 515,544 BNB, fair value ~$317.3m, 30 Apr 2026 (fiscal year end). Its own dashboard has separately shown 515,054 BNB at an unspecified date. | Filed fact — full-year fiscal 2026 results released 23 Jun 2026 | Active, stressed. Average cost ~$851.29/BNB against an implied ~$615 at year end — materially underwater. Fell out of compliance with Nasdaq Listing Rule 5620(a) and had to hold a special meeting on 22 Jul 2026 to fix it. |
| Evernorth Holdings Inc. (XRPN reserved — not trading as at 26 Aug 2026) | XRP | 473.1 million XRP, 31 Dec 2025. No dated 2026 figure verified. | Filed fact — Form S-4 filed 18 Mar 2026 and subsequent amendments | Unlisted. The SPAC merger with Armada Acquisition Corp. II had not been confirmed as closed. Do not describe this as purchasable. |
| TAO Synergies, Inc. (TAOX, Nasdaq) | TAO (Bittensor) | Unverified for 2026. Last firm company figure: "over 54,000 TAO", late 2025. | Company statement, undated on the website. Do not publish a figure without pulling the latest 10-Q. | Active. Competing "largest TAO holder" claims with xTAO Inc (41,538 TAO) — neither carries a comparable as-at date, which is exactly the problem. |
| GameSquare Holdings, Inc. (GAME, Nasdaq) | ETH plus an NFT | No verified 2026 figure. Last figures are 2025: 15,630.07 ETH after a $10m purchase. | Company statements, 2025 only | Unverified. Its ether may be encumbered as collateral per secondary coverage; it should not be characterised numerically. |
| FG Nexus Inc. (FGNX, Nasdaq; formerly Fundamental Global) | Was ETH | Zero digital assets at 30 Jun 2026. Peak holdings exceeded 50,000 ETH by September 2025. | Filed fact — Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 Jun 2026 | Wound down. $60.96m of cash proceeds from ether sales in H1 2026, plus a $14.98m receivable collected in July. |
| Forum Markets, Incorporated (FRMM, Nasdaq; was ETHZilla, was 180 Life Sciences) | Was ETH; now tokenised real-world assets | Exited — sold the majority of its ETH in March 2026. Residual at 30 Jun 2026 not quantified by the company. | Company statement — Q2 2026 results release, 13 Aug 2026 | Pivoted. Now holds two CFM56 jet engines (~$12.2m) tokenised on Arbitrum and manufactured-home loans. |
| Alpha Compute Corp. | Was TON | Nil after a July 2026 wind-down | Company statement — release of 10 Jul 2026. Ticker and exchange unverified. | Wound down. Roughly $6m of TON was returned to Animoca Brands affiliates and put-option liabilities extinguished. Outside shareholders received nothing. |
| Solana Company (HSDT, Nasdaq; formerly Helius Medical Technologies) | SOL | Unverified. No dated 2026 holdings figure could be confirmed from a primary source. | The only firm data point is funding: a $500m PIPE led by Pantera Capital (September 2025) plus $750m of stapled warrants. | Unverified — should not be characterised for readers. |
The yield is revenue, and the company keeps it
This is the central point of this whole section and it is routinely misreported. Across every company we verified, staking rewards are recognised as corporate revenue and retained. Not one distributes staking yield to common shareholders.
The filed evidence is unambiguous. Sharplink booked "Revenue from staking" of $11.161m in the second quarter of 2026 and $22.662m in the first half (filed fact, Form 8-K Exhibit 99.1, 10 August 2026). That sits on the income statement above selling, general and administrative expenses of $9.06m for the same quarter. In other words, the staking line very nearly pays the corporate overhead. It functions closer to an operating subsidy for the company than to a return for the shareholder, and describing it as "yield you receive" is simply wrong.
Tron Inc books its equivalent as "unrealized income from staking activities" — $3.0m in the first quarter of 2026 and $6.33m across the first half, including $3.35m in Q2 (filed fact). Note the word "unrealized": that is accrued token value, not cash received, and it is retained.
The only mechanism we found that actually connects staking yield to shareholders is a buyback: GameSquare approved a repurchase programme "funded by Ethereum yield proceeds" in 2025 (its 2026 status is unverified). That is the exception, not the rule. Hyperliquid Strategies is explicit about the intended direction of travel, promising "compounding shareholder returns... through staking, yield optimization, and active ecosystem engagement" — note that this promises compounding inside the company, not distribution out of it.
The scale mismatch between yield and price
Ether staking yields roughly 2.7–2.9% — BitMine's own disclosures show a seven-day yield of 2.91% annualised against the CESR benchmark of 2.84% as at 8 March 2026, and 2.67% as at 23 August 2026. Solana is higher: Forward Industries discloses 6.73% gross validator APY before fees. Bittensor root-network staking has been claimed at around 10%, which mostly reflects emission-driven dilution rather than fee revenue — a different thing from a yield, and readers should understand the difference.
Now put those percentages against the price moves in the same filings:
- Sharplink, first half of 2026: staking revenue $22.7m against an unrealised loss of $827.7m and a net loss of $1,079.8m. Filed facts.
- FG Nexus, the definitive illustration: over the entire life of its roughly eleven-month ether programme it earned $144,000 in staking revenue, and recorded a $45.2m operating loss on discontinued digital-asset operations in the first half of 2026 alone. Filed facts, Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2026. The staking yield was about three-tenths of one percent of the loss.
A 3% return on an asset that fell far more than 3% is not a return. Any explainer that presents "these ones pay you yield" without that ratio is misleading you by omission.
Slashing, lock-ups and validator failure
Slashing is asymmetric across chains, and it is usually the least of it. Ethereum has genuine slashing: a validator that double-signs or surrounds a vote loses stake and is forcibly exited. Solana's official documentation states slashing "is not automatic" and is applied only on a network restart after an attacker halts the chain; native SOL delegation has carried no slashing loss to date. Hyperliquid uses delegated proof-of-stake. TRX uses a freeze-and-vote model with 27 Super Representatives, not slashing at all. The bigger operational risks are validator downtime, custodian failure, and smart-contract or wrapper failure — the one that has actually cost money.
Unbonding lock-ups are the constraint nobody prices. Ethereum's queues are asymmetric and stress-correlated: as at 17 August 2026 the exit queue was trivial (2 validators, about 64 ETH, minutes) while the entry queue held 2,229,411 ETH — about 39 days. But in September 2025 the exit queue peaked at around 2.67 million ETH: weeks to unstake, precisely when everybody wanted out. The queue is short when nobody needs it.
Solana deactivation completes only at an epoch boundary, roughly two days, and no more than 25% of total network stake can activate or deactivate in one epoch — a system-wide throttle that binds exactly during a stampede. Hyperliquid imposes a one-day delegation lock-up plus a hard seven-day unstaking queue that cannot be accelerated, roughly eight days end to end. A company that states an objective of staking 100% of its treasury is therefore, at any moment, about eight days away from being able to sell anything.
Our inference, clearly flagged as such: BitMine reported exactly 5,067,309 ETH staked on both 9 and 23 August 2026 despite buying ether every week in between. That is consistent with newly bought ether sitting in Ethereum's roughly 39-day entry queue. The company has not said so.
Counterparty failure is not theoretical. Reliz Ltd, the operating entity of crypto brokerage BlockFills, filed for Chapter 11 on 16 March 2026. Keel Infrastructure had closed its outstanding positions with BlockFills before the filing and recognised a net gain of $1.9m, but still booked a credit loss expense (filed fact). "Yield on your tokens" frequently means lending them to somebody who can go bankrupt.
The wrapper problem
Headline "ETH held" numbers frequently are not ether. Sharplink's own footnotes disclose that its 888,938 ETH as at 3 August 2026 comprises 634,255 native ETH plus 181,748 ETH "as-if redeemed" from LsETH (Liquid Collective) plus 72,935 ETH "as-if redeemed" from weETH (ether.fi restaking). Roughly 29% of the headline figure is a liquid-staking or liquid-restaking token valued at a theoretical redemption rate.
That matters twice over. First, redemption depends on a protocol's queue and on its peg holding. Second, US accounting treats the two differently: Sharplink carries native ether at fair value but carries LsETH and weETH at cost less impairment, and the company states plainly that impairment charges "are not reversed for subsequent market recoveries". It took $76.1m of such charges in Q2 2026 and $267.8m across the half — losses that can never be written back even if ether recovers fully. Filed facts.
Tron Inc is the concentrated version of the same risk: published analysis of its filings indicates over 90% of assets sit in JustLend sTRX, a single uninsured DeFi protocol (press report). That is smart-contract risk on the entire balance sheet, not slashing risk. FG Nexus took a $2.8m impairment specifically on wrapped staked ether, separate from and additional to its $41.2m of losses on ether itself — the wrapper cost extra (filed fact).
"Yield-bearing" and "holds the asset" are not the same claim.
Not all "yield" is staking
GameSquare targeted 8–14% annualised through Dialectic's on-chain platform from 1 August 2025. That is DeFi lending and looping — liquidation, oracle and smart-contract risk — not consensus rewards. Any comparison table that places "8–14%" next to BitMine's 2.67% without that distinction is actively misleading.
XRP has no native staking at all. The XRP Ledger uses a federated consensus protocol with no block rewards and no proof-of-stake issuance, so an XRP treasury cannot run the ether or solana yield argument. Evernorth's stated plan is to lend XRP, provide liquidity, run options strategies and deploy Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin in DeFi — every one of which is counterparty, market or smart-contract risk rather than protocol yield. VivoPower's stated plan to "stake" XRP on the Flare Network means bridging it as FXRP and deploying it into lending-style products. Any coverage describing "XRP staking" is wrong. Around eight companies had publicly disclosed XRP treasury strategies as at January 2026 with aggregate stated commitments above $2bn — commitments, not verified holdings, and we would publish no figure for Trident Digital, Webus International or VivoPower without a filing.
One genuine second-order business does exist. Validator commission — SOL Strategies' 3.8 million SOL of assets under delegation, Forward's and DeFi Development's own validators, BitMine's MAVAN network, Tron's move to seek Super Representative status — is real, recurring and not directly token-directional. It is also small relative to treasury mark-to-market, which is why it never rescues a quarter.
Why should you not trust a holdings aggregator?
Because they are demonstrably wrong, and we can show you exactly where.
The Sharplink discrepancy
On the same date in August 2026, The Block's page for SBET showed 868,699 ETH. Sharplink's own Form 8-K Exhibit 99.1, filed 10 August 2026, showed 888,938 ETH as at 3 August 2026.
That is a gap of 20,239 ether between a widely cited tracker and the company's own filed disclosure — more ether than most non-bitcoin treasury companies hold in total. Neither number is a typo; the tracker was simply running behind, or counting a different bucket, and it did not say which.
Use the filing. Not the tracker.
The bitcoin side of the sector shows the same failure in four different flavours, all listed under how big is the sector, really: a company that never listed still ranked fifth by holdings; a private company counted as public; exchanges and custodians whose coin belongs to their customers; and an entity listed under a name it stopped using on 22 July 2026, at a holdings figure more than double what its own filing reported.
There is a fifth flavour that catches even careful readers: gross figures presented as ownership. Galaxy Digital's Form 10-Q filed 10 August 2026 shows 21,084 bitcoin in its significant-holdings table. That is not Galaxy's treasury. The filing says the balance "includes digital assets borrowed from counterparties, deposited by counterparties as collateral for which Galaxy has control, and any digital assets which Galaxy has pledged as collateral and retains control." Set against it: $1,514.5m of digital assets borrowed and $983.1m of collateral payable. Galaxy does not disclose a clean net own-account figure, and we will not invent one. Any list ranking Galaxy among the largest corporate bitcoin holders on that number is measuring the wrong thing.
Which filing to open instead
- For a weekly holdings figure: the company's latest Form 8-K, usually under Item 8.01, with the holding, the average price and the share count in one table. Strategy, Strive and BitMine all disclose this way.
- For what is actually owned: the digital assets note in the Form 10-Q. This is where cost basis, fair value and the split between unrestricted, restricted, pledged, loaned and derecognised live. For Sharplink's ether, it is Exhibit 99.1 to the 8-K of 10 August 2026 and the footnote splitting native ether from LsETH and weETH.
- For a foreign private issuer — Bitdeer, Sequans, Prenetics, Genius Group, SOL Strategies — the equivalent is Form 6-K, and there is no quarterly 10-Q obligation, so the cadence is slower and cross-company comparison is weaker than it looks.
- For Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris and Canada: the HKEXnews announcement, the TDnet filing, the Euronext regulatory release, and SEDAR+ respectively.
Corporates are not treasury companies
Tesla holds bitcoin. So does Block. So does Coinbase. None of them is a treasury company, and the distinction is teachable in one sentence each.
A treasury company's purpose is holding. Holding is the business. It funds purchases by issuing securities — at-the-market equity, convertible notes, preferred stock — so the share is a claim on a coin pile whose coins per share moves every time management taps the market. There is no operating cash flow to fall back on. You are exposed to two things at once: the coin price, and management's issuance decisions.
An operating company holds a treasury position alongside a real business, and does not issue equity to buy more of it. The coin sits on the balance sheet as one line among many. The share price is a claim on the business.
| Company | What it owns, and as at when | How it got there | Why it is not a treasury company |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tesla, Inc. (TSLA, Nasdaq) | 11,509 bitcoin at an acquisition cost of $386m, as at 30 Jun 2026 and 31 Dec 2025 — identical on both dates. Total digital assets carrying value $674m at 30 Jun 2026, down from $1,008m. Filed fact, Form 10-Q filed 23 Jul 2026. | Corporate cash, bought in early 2021 with roughly three-quarters sold in 2022. Tesla has never issued equity or debt to buy bitcoin. No purchases or sales in H1 2026. | $674m of digital assets inside $148.5bn of total assets — under half of one percent. The bitcoin creates earnings noise ($334m unrealised loss in H1 2026) but does not drive the equity. The filing says "the majority of our digital assets" were bitcoin, so a small unquantified residual exists — do not present $674m as the value of 11,509 coins. |
| Block, Inc. (XYZ, NYSE — ticker was SQ) | 9,117 bitcoin held for investment at 30 Jun 2026 (cost $310.2m, fair value $533.9m), plus 299 bitcoin held for operating purposes ($19.5m). Filed fact, Form 10-Q filed 5 Aug 2026, Note 11. | Operating cash flow. It added 149 bitcoin in Q1 2026 and 85 in Q2 — 234 coins for roughly $17.6m across the half. | The purchases are immaterial to the business, yet the position produced a $261.3m remeasurement loss in H1 2026 against a $118.8m gain a year earlier — a $380.1m swing on a position management barely touched. Note also that customer bitcoin in Cash App wallets is not Block's: the filing states customers retain legal ownership and Block does not lend, pledge or use it as collateral. |
| Coinbase Global, Inc. (COIN, Nasdaq) | Held for investment at 30 Jun 2026: 17,311 bitcoin (fair value $1,013.2m) and 150,279 ether ($235.7m), total pool fair value $1,468.4m. Held for operations: a further $86.5m. Filed fact, Form 10-Q filed 30 Jul 2026. | Retained earnings and crypto received in the ordinary course of running an exchange. It does not issue equity to buy crypto. | The best available example of "owned" versus "custodied". Alongside its own $1.5bn sit $245.9bn of customer Assets on Platform, 22,609 bitcoin and 24,965 ether recognised as lending collateral belonging to borrowers, 4,794 bitcoin of customer derivatives collateral, and $1.26bn of customer collateral it does not even recognise. It also borrows crypto — 1,869 BTC and 65,685 ETH at 30 Jun 2026. Add these up naively and you credit Coinbase with tens of thousands of coins it does not own. |
| Galaxy Digital Inc. (GLXY, Nasdaq) | 21,084 bitcoin gross at 30 Jun 2026 (carrying value $1,234.3m) — not a treasury figure. Total digital assets $3,517.4m. Filed fact as to the gross number, Form 10-Q filed 10 Aug 2026. | Trading and financing operations. Crypto inventory is working capital for a broker-like business, financed substantially by borrowing crypto from counterparties. | Against the gross balance sit $1,514.5m of digital assets borrowed and $983.1m of collateral payable. Galaxy's net own-account bitcoin position cannot be derived from the filing and we do not publish one. It is also a miner turned landlord, converting its Helios site to AI data centres. |
| Robinhood Markets, Inc. (HOOD, Nasdaq) | No material proprietary crypto treasury position identified in its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 Jun 2026, filed 30 Jul 2026. | Not applicable — no accumulation programme found. | Included deliberately as a negative example. Robinhood touches enormous volumes of crypto through Robinhood Crypto and Bitstamp; almost none of it is Robinhood's. If a broker or exchange appears near the top of a corporate-holdings league table, the table is measuring the wrong thing. |
Four things that change when holding is the business
- Dilution runs the other way. In a treasury company the share count is a policy lever pulled in order to buy coins; dilution is the engine. In an operating company share issuance is incidental. CleanSpark went the opposite way entirely, spending $460.0m buying back its own stock in the nine months to 30 June 2026 while selling coins (filed fact). No treasury company does that; it is the model inverted.
- You are valuing a different thing. Treasury company: coins per share, times coin price, times whatever premium or discount the market applies. Operating company: discounted cash flows from a business, plus a small asset on the side. Applying either framework to the other produces nonsense.
- Forced-seller risk exists in only one of them. A treasury company that has borrowed against its coins can be made to sell into a falling market by a lender. An operating company with a modest unlevered position has no such mechanism.
- The accounting now bites both. Since ASU 2023-08, crypto is marked to fair value through net income every quarter. An operating company's reported earnings therefore swing on the coin price even though its business has not changed. Separate "the business got worse" from "the coin went down" before you conclude anything. KULR's own chief financial officer made exactly this point in August 2026, saying bitcoin volatility made "the underlying performance of our battery business more difficult for shareholders to assess" — and then exited the position.
Miners are different again
A treasury company's only real cost is financing. A miner is an industrial business that happens to be paid in bitcoin, and it carries four risks a treasury company simply does not have.
- Operating costs that do not fall when the coin does. MARA's Form 10-Q states energy alone was 54.9% of owned mining revenues in Q2 2026, up from 34.1% a year earlier — the cost did not rise, the revenue fell. A treasury company holding through a drawdown simply holds. A miner keeps paying the power bill.
- Energy exposure, including collateral calls. Power and transmission contracts demand security. TeraWulf posted $360.7m of letters of credit in July 2026 for one campus, cash-collateralising $286.7m of it with a $295.3m deposit (103%). That is nearly $300m of cash locked up before a single server is powered.
- Hardware depreciation — the risk most readers miss entirely. Rigs are wasting assets. CleanSpark booked $111.0m of depreciation in a quarter with $138.0m of revenue. HIVE recorded $52.2m against $79.1m of quarterly revenue — 66%. Core Scientific took a $266.5m impairment on mining property and equipment in Q1 2026, $151.6m of it because rigs were carried above secondary-market value, then a further $19.5m loss remeasuring machines held for sale and a $41.9m loss to terminate a mining-equipment purchase contract with Block, Inc. Bitcoin in a wallet does not depreciate; the machines that produce it lose value relentlessly.
- The halving. The block subsidy halves roughly every four years — cut to 3.125 BTC per block in April 2024, next expected around 2028. Revenue per unit of work is contractually programmed to fall by half on a schedule no company controls. There is no equivalent for a holder.
Net effect: a miner's equity is a leveraged, decaying claim on the bitcoin price minus a large and sticky cost base, with a scheduled revenue cut built in. It is not a proxy for holding bitcoin.
What the miners actually hold, and what is pledged
All figures below are as at 30 June 2026 and come from each company's own Form 10-Q for that quarter, with the filing date shown. The encumbrance column is the part usually buried in the notes, and it is the part that matters.
| Company (ticker) | Headline BTC | Held outright | Loaned, pledged or posted as collateral | Filing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MARA Holdings (MARA) | 35,577 | 26,307 | 9,270 (26%) — 4,742 loaned under master securities loan agreements, 4,528 pledged as collateral of which 4,253 secure borrowings. Subsequent event: on 4 Aug 2026, 18,750 BTC worth ~$1.2bn were pledged as initial collateral for new Coinbase and Two Prime facilities — over half the position, encumbered five weeks after the balance sheet date. | 10-Q filed 6 Aug 2026 |
| Hut 8 Corp. (HUT) | 17,316 | 9,376 | 7,940 (45.9%) — 3,090 pledged to Bitmain for machine purchases, 4,850 pledged as collateral for the FalconX term loan. Hut 8 publishes the cleanest encumbrance table in the sector. | 10-Q filed 4 Aug 2026 |
| CleanSpark, Inc. (CLSK) | 12,205 on the bitcoin line | 12,205 | A separate line, "Receivable from bitcoin collateral", holds a further 1,719 BTC ($100.6m) posted to derivative counterparties where control transferred, so those coins were derecognised as bitcoin. Economic exposure is 13,924 (our inference). No bitcoin posted under its bitcoin-backed credit lines at the date. | 10-Q filed 6 Aug 2026 (fiscal Q3; year ends 30 Sep) |
| Riot Platforms, Inc. (RIOT) | 11,380 | 5,559 | 5,821 (51.2%) shown as a separate balance-sheet line, "Restricted bitcoin", pledged to secure the $200m Coinbase Credit facility. The filing notes the collateral "may not be used by the lender to secure any other loan account" — a genuine protection worth contrasting with rehypothecation elsewhere. | 10-Q filed 10 Aug 2026 |
| American Bitcoin Corp. (ABTC) | 8,002 | 4,912 | 3,090 (38.6%) pledged to Bitmain for miner purchases. Cost basis $781.9m against a $478.9m carrying value. | 10-Q filed 3 Aug 2026 |
| Keel Infrastructure Corp. (KEEL — was Bitfarms, BITF) | 2,261 | 2,261 | None. Restricted digital assets nil at 30 Jun 2026, against 625 restricted a year earlier. A press report of Exhibit 99.1 to its 8-K of 10 Aug 2026 puts holdings at 1,861 BTC as at 7 Aug 2026 amid a wind-down — open the exhibit yourself rather than taking that figure from us. | 10-Q filed 10 Aug 2026 |
| Core Scientific, Inc. (CORZ) | 848 | 848 | None. All self-mined; a full-text search of the 10-Q returns no pledge or collateral language against the bitcoin. | 10-Q filed 28 Jul 2026 |
| Cipher Digital Inc. (CIFR — was Cipher Mining) | 646 | 646 | None at the date — no amounts outstanding on the Coinbase overnight facility at 30 Jun 2026, against $25.0m drawn at 31 Dec 2025. But the facility permits rehypothecation, so drawing it derecognises the coin. | 10-Q filed 4 Aug 2026 |
| HIVE Digital Technologies (HIVE) | 190 | 190 | None, and it says so more clearly than anyone: bitcoin is held in segregated storage with Fireblocks and Bank Frick, "not collateralized... against debt or other obligations of any kind", not stored on any exchange, and "never staked... or loaned to any third party". One honest nuance: it holds options to repurchase 212 bitcoin paid away as equipment deposits, struck at $110,000 against a ~$58,237 mark and carried at $0.1m — effectively worthless. Those coins have gone. | 10-Q filed 14 Aug 2026 (fiscal Q1 2027; year ends 31 Mar) |
| TeraWulf Inc. (WULF) | 2 | 2 | None, and none needed. Two bitcoin, carrying basis $135 thousand. | 10-Q filed 5 Aug 2026 |
Read the encumbrance column before the headline column. MARA is the flagship case: 35,577 coins reported, 26,307 genuinely free at the balance sheet date, and then more than half the position pledged within five weeks of it. A reader relying on the 30 June number alone would badly misjudge the risk. MARA also explicitly rejects passive holding, describing bitcoin as "a productive asset" to be activated "through lending, structured trading arrangements, and collateralized financing" — which earns income and converts a bitcoin holding into a portfolio of counterparty credit exposures, complete with an allowance for credit losses.
The miners are also no longer accumulating. MARA sold approximately 23,093 bitcoin in the first half of 2026, cutting holdings from 53,822 to 35,577, having expanded its policy in 2026 "to allow for sales of bitcoin held on our balance sheet". Riot sold 9,665 bitcoin for $732.5m and realised a $113.2m loss, funding itself by selling coins rather than issuing shares. Cipher sold $123.4m of bitcoin at a realised loss of $47.7m. Core Scientific sold $208.2m of self-mined coin. HIVE mined 1,004 bitcoin in the June quarter and ended it holding 190. Our inference: the miners-to-AI rotation is one of the largest sources of corporate bitcoin supply in 2026, and it is the counterweight rarely set against the "companies are accumulating" narrative.
One more trap: American Bitcoin's 8,002 coins are consolidated into Hut 8's 17,316 (filed fact, Hut 8 Form 10-Q filed 4 Aug 2026). Adding the two published headline totals together overstates the sector by 8,002. By arithmetic (our inference, not a disclosed figure), Hut 8 at corporate level holds the residual 9,314, of which 4,850 are the FalconX pledge. The bitcointreasuries.net leaderboard carries Hut 8 at 10,278, close to that residual, so it may already be showing the company excluding American Bitcoin rather than double-counting it — unresolved, and the reason we do not assert a tracker double-count. American Bitcoin's management is also unusually clear that it is not a treasury company: "we generate bitcoin through scaled infrastructure rather than simply holding it on a balance sheet." Its accumulation is funded by production economics rather than by an equity premium, so it does not stop working when mNAV falls below 1.0 — but it is exposed to hashprice, energy costs and the halving instead.
The pivot to AI and HPC data centres
Several miners have stopped accumulating and rebuilt as data-centre landlords. The hardest number is Core Scientific's revenue mix: in Q2 2026, colocation revenue was $136.7m against digital-asset self-mining of just $21.5m — colocation is 83% of revenue, against $10.6m of $78.6m (13%) a year earlier. Its CoreWeave contract covers roughly 590 MW across five sites with about 395 MW billing, and it controls around 2.1 GW of gross utility power. Its own filing describes "the wind-down of our remaining mining obligations". Filed facts.
TeraWulf is the extreme case, and the most powerful single fact in this whole section: a company routinely listed as a "bitcoin miner" holds two bitcoin. Its property, plant and equipment is $3.60bn, of which $2,371.4m is construction in process, while miners are just $182.1m of gross cost — construction in process is thirteen times the value of the mining rigs. Anyone buying WULF for bitcoin exposure owns essentially none.
The rest of the cohort is going the same way. Cipher renamed itself from Cipher Mining to Cipher Digital, spent $964.3m on property and equipment in H1 2026 and raised $2.77bn of notes. Hut 8 raised $7.70bn of project debt in H1 2026 held in restricted construction accounts and now calls itself "an energy infrastructure platform", with mining third on the list. Riot signed a data-centre lease with AMD (50 MW, expandable to 200 MW) and, in August 2026, a lease with an unnamed "leading frontier AI lab" for an initial 191 MW. MARA restructured at a cost of $47.6m explicitly "to reallocate resources toward AI initiatives" and now describes itself as "a digital infrastructure company". Buying one of these shares in 2026 is increasingly a bet on data-centre construction execution and single-tenant credit risk, not on bitcoin — and Core Scientific's colocation revenue is concentrated in a single customer.
One correction worth making because a great deal of coverage still gets it wrong: CoreWeave does not own Core Scientific. CoreWeave agreed a roughly $9bn all-stock acquisition on 7 July 2025, and Core Scientific's own shareholders voted it down on 30 October 2025, with the merger agreement terminated the same day. Core Scientific trades independently on Nasdaq.
Failures, wind-downs and deals that died
This is the most under-published part of the sector, so we give it the space it deserves. Read it against the marketing language of 2025, when coin on a corporate balance sheet was routinely described as a permanent reserve asset that would never be sold.
| Company | What happened, and when | Why — the mechanism | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Genius Group (GNS) | Sold the remainder of its bitcoin and repaid its $8.5m of debt in full; zero BTC from 1 Apr 2026. Roughly 96 BTC sold between late December 2025 and early February 2026, then the final 84.15 BTC on 1 Apr 2026. | Legal, not market. A New York court issued a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction barring it from selling shares or using investor funds to buy bitcoin. That severed leg one of the model outright. With no ability to issue equity, the only way to service the debt was to liquidate the treasury. | Filed fact — Q1 2026 results release furnished on Form 6-K, 1 Apr 2026 |
| Prenetics Global (PRE) | Board authorised complete divestment of approximately 510 BTC on 1 May 2026, targeted for completion by 14 May 2026, expected gross proceeds ~$40m. Adopted a standing policy never to buy bitcoin or any digital asset again. | Capital allocation, not distress. No debt outstanding; the coin had been bought with cash from disposals. The board simply concluded capital was more productively deployed in its consumer health business. | Filed fact — Form 6-K furnished 4 May 2026 |
| Sequans Communications (SQNS) | Holdings fell from 1,514 BTC at 31 Mar 2026 to 314 at 30 Jun 2026 — roughly 79% in one quarter. Convertible debt fully redeemed in May 2026; balance sheet now debt-free. | Debt-driven unwind, not a strategic rethink. The bitcoin had been pledged against the convertibles; when bitcoin fell, the collateral position became the binding constraint. Q1 2026 alone produced a $50.5m operating loss including a $29.3m unrealised impairment and an $11.7m realised loss on sales. | Filed fact — Q2 2026 earnings release on Form 6-K, listing "our planned exit from our Bitcoin treasury strategy" among its risks |
| KULR Technology (KULR) | Sold approximately 333 BTC between 9 and 23 July 2026 at a weighted average of ~$64,538 for gross proceeds of ~$21.5m, and repaid its $20.0m Coinbase Credit facility in full, with all 565.00 BTC of pledged collateral expected to be released. Also exited bitcoin mining. | Reporting clarity. Its own CFO said bitcoin volatility — about $10.6m of non-cash fair-value losses — made the battery business "more difficult for shareholders to assess". Q2 2026 net loss $21,970,816 on revenue of $2,080,177, against net income of $8,142,149 a year earlier. | Filed fact — Form 8-K filed 24 Jul 2026 and Q2 2026 release, 13 Aug 2026 |
| Bitdeer (BTDR) | Corporate bitcoin reserves taken to zero on 20 Feb 2026, selling the remaining 943.1 BTC plus 189.8 BTC of weekly production. | Liquidity for an AI pivot — powered-land acquisitions and NVIDIA GB200 deployments. It mines bitcoin (2,694 BTC in Q2 2026) and sells it: US$195.5m of proceeds from disposals in the period. | Press report of the company's weekly update for the zero figure; the Q2 disposals are a filed fact (Form 6-K, 10 Aug 2026) |
| Empery Digital (EMPD, formerly Volcon) | From roughly 3,724 BTC in early February 2026 to 1,279 at 6 Aug 2026, of which only 325 unrestricted. Sold 1,635 BTC for $102.2m and repaid $20.0m of borrowings, on which the lender returned 585 BTC of collateral. | Collateral spiral, then a second pivot. Terms were renegotiated after bitcoin fell on 4 February and again on 3 June 2026. The filing says proceeds funded data-centre investments and that further such investments "could require additional sales of BTC". | Filed fact — Form 10-Q filed 7 Aug 2026 |
| LM Funding America → PowerCompute (LMFA → PWCM) | 1-for-25 reverse split effective 13 Jul 2026; name change effective 22 Jul 2026; pivot to HPC/AI. Holdings 211.4 BTC at 31 Dec 2025 to 144.6 at 30 Jun 2026 on the bitcoin line. | Compliance plus rehypothecation. Carries a going-concern discussion: approximately $854 thousand of available cash at 30 Jun 2026 against pledged coin securing ~$11m of borrowings. | Filed fact — Form 10-Q filed 14 Aug 2026; EDGAR entity record confirms the rename |
| Semler Scientific (SMLR) | Acquired by Strive on 16 Jan 2026 in an all-stock deal, bringing 5,048.1 BTC. Filed Form 15-12G on 26 Jan 2026 to deregister. Shares no longer trade. | Consolidation. A real operating company that bolted on a bitcoin treasury, then had the treasury become the reason it was bought — with the operating medical-device business earmarked for disposal within twelve months of close. | Filed fact — EDGAR: CIK 0001554859 now carries no tickers and no exchanges |
| Bitcoin Standard Treasury / BSTR | Never listed. The SPAC business combination with Cantor Equity Partners I was terminated in its entirety on 20 Aug 2026, with all ancillary documents "of no further force and effect" and mutual releases. | A failed launch that trackers have not removed. BSTR, or Blockstream Capital Partners at its request, agreed to pay CEPO $15,000,000 — $10m by 19 Sep 2026 and $5m by 1 Dec 2026. A prior 8-K of 8 July 2026 had already flagged the deal would not complete on the original terms. | Filed fact — Cantor Equity Partners I Form 8-K, 20 Aug 2026 |
| FG Nexus (FGNX) | Ether position taken to zero by 30 Jun 2026, roughly eleven months after launch. $60.96m of cash proceeds in H1 2026 plus a $14.98m receivable collected in July. | The yield never mattered. $144,000 of staking revenue over the entire programme against a $45.2m operating loss on discontinued digital-asset operations in H1 2026 alone. Proceeds redeployed into manufactured housing. | Filed fact — Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 Jun 2026 |
| ETHZilla → Forum Markets (ETHZ → FRMM) | Sold ~$40m of ether in October 2025 to fund a $250m buyback; 24,291 ETH for ~$74.5m in December 2025 to redeem senior secured convertible notes; the majority of the rest in March 2026. Renamed 25 Feb 2026, ticker FRMM from 2 Mar 2026. | The full reflexive loop: shell to treasury to reverse split to discount to forced token sales to abandonment. Q2 2026 revenue fell to ~$1.4m from ~$2.9m purely because $1.8m of quarterly staking revenue disappeared with the tokens. | Company statement — Q2 2026 results release, 13 Aug 2026; EDGAR entity record for the name chain |
| Alpha Compute Corp. | Completed the wind-down of its TON treasury in July 2026, returning approximately $6m of TON to Animoca Brands affiliates and eliminating liabilities tied to TON put options. | Put options attached to contributed tokens. Tokens "contributed" by a strategic backer can come with options that are liabilities of the company. On the wind-down the tokens went back to the contributors; outside shareholders received nothing. | Company statement — release of 10 Jul 2026. Ticker and venue unverified. |
| Next Technology Holding (NXTT) | Still holds 5,833 BTC. Shares outstanding went from 4,882,556 to 147,296,192 in six months, then a 1-for-100 reverse split on 10 Aug 2026 on top of a 1-for-200 in September 2025. | Failure without a sale. The treasury was never touched; the claim on it was destroyed by issuance. This is the failure mode a holdings-only table cannot see. | Filed fact for both figures — Form 10-Q filed 24 Jul 2026; the August split is a press report |
Governance failure belongs on this list too. Twenty One Capital's chief executive Jack Mallers resigned as CEO and director effective 20 July 2026; the Form 8-K of 21 July 2026 states the departure was "not related to any disagreements with the Company", though Mallers publicly cited differences with the board over strategy. Raphael Zagury was appointed CEO, a proposed three-way merger with Strike and Elektron Energy was abandoned, and a two-way combination was reported as under consideration (press report, not filed). CEA Industries had to regain compliance with Nasdaq Listing Rule 5620(a) — the requirement to hold an annual meeting — by convening a special meeting on 22 July 2026. These are basic corporate-governance failures at companies asking the market for capital.
Two patterns are worth naming. First, marketing language survives the balance sheet by a considerable margin: Genius Group still described itself as "a leading AI-powered, Bitcoin-first education group" in the very release that disclosed it held no bitcoin, and said it "will recommence building its Bitcoin Treasury when it believes market conditions are more favourable". Check filings, not slogans. Second, two failed ether treasuries independently pivoted to physical cash-flowing assets — Forum Markets to tokenised jet engines and manufactured-home loans, FG Nexus to manufactured housing. When the wrapper fails, the capital does not go back to the token.
The full anatomy of what goes wrong, and the order in which it goes wrong, is set out in what actually goes wrong at a bitcoin treasury company. UK-listed wind-downs — including a company whose shareholders voted to liquidate its entire bitcoin position, return the capital and delist from the London Stock Exchange in July 2026 — are covered on the UK page linked at the top of this one.
How to verify any of this yourself
A snapshot goes stale. A method does not. Everything on this page came from documents you can open, and this is the order to open them in.
- Find the registrant, not the brand. Search the company on EDGAR full-text search or the EDGAR company browser and note its CIK number. The CIK never changes, even when the name and the ticker do. Semler's CIK still exists; its tickers and exchanges do not.
- Read the former names. The SEC's submissions record for a CIK carries a
formerNamesfield — for examplehttps://data.sec.gov/submissions/CIK0001920406.jsonfor Strive. That is the fastest honest history of what a company used to be, and it is where the identity chains on this page came from. - For the current holding, read the weekly Form 8-K. Strategy, Strive and BitMine disclose under Item 8.01. The holding, the average price, the share counts and the cash balances are usually in one table.
- For the real balance sheet, read the digital assets note in the 10-Q. Search the document for "pledged", "collateral", "restricted", "rehypothecate" and "receivable". Those five words separate what a company holds from what it owns. If a "Receivable from bitcoin collateral" or "Digital assets receivable" line exists, the headline holdings number is incomplete in one direction or the other.
- Check the share count on the cover page. Holdings flat and shares up means fewer coins per share. This is precisely what happened at Next Technology Holding, and no holdings table would have shown it.
- Read the subsequent-events note. MARA's 30 June encumbrance was 26%; its subsequent-events note discloses a further 18,750 coins pledged on 4 August. The most important fact in a filing is often dated after the balance sheet.
- For a non-bitcoin treasury, find the wrapper split. Ask how much of the headline token count is native and how much is a liquid-staking or restaking token valued "as if redeemed". Then find whether the wrapped portion is carried at cost less impairment, and whether those impairments can be reversed. Usually they cannot.
- Know who does not file quarterly. Foreign private issuers — Bitdeer, Sequans, Prenetics, Genius Group, Boyaa, SOL Strategies — file Form 6-K and have no 10-Q obligation, so cross-company comparison is weaker than it looks.
- Use the right venue's feed. HKEXnews for Hong Kong, TDnet for Japan, the Euronext regulatory feed for Paris, SEDAR+ for Canada, and the FCA's National Storage Mechanism for UK RNS announcements.
- Check corporate actions. Reverse splits, ticker changes and delistings are published by the exchanges. This is how you catch that a ticker in an old list now points at something else entirely.
- Treat aggregators as a starting point only, and always click through to the filing. On the Sharplink example alone, the gap was 20,239 ether.
What this means if you are a UK investor
Four practical points, none of which are recommendations.
These are shares, and they are taxed as shares. Buying MSTR, ASST, BMNR or 3350 is buying a foreign equity, not a cryptoasset. The disposal is a share disposal for Capital Gains Tax and the share pooling rules apply — not the cryptoasset guidance you would use for holding bitcoin directly. That difference is precisely why this sector attracts UK retail interest: a listed share can sit inside an ISA or a SIPP where the coin itself cannot. If you are new to the terminology, start with what are digital assets, a UK primer.
The listing venue decides whether an ISA is even possible, and it splits three ways. HMRC maintains a list of recognised stock exchanges. NYSE, Nasdaq, NYSE American, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong and the Canadian Securities Exchange are long-standing entries, so the US, Japanese, Hong Kong and Canadian lines above are ordinarily eligible in principle. A growth market is not disqualified for being a growth market — the test is whether HMRC has designated that specific market. Some are and some are not. In the UK, both AIM and the AQSE Growth Market are HMRC-designated, and shares admitted to them can be held in an ISA, which is why the London names on our UK-listed bitcoin treasury companies page are not ruled out on venue grounds. That designation does not travel with a brand: HMRC's recognition of Nasdaq does not extend to the Nasdaq First North markets, so the Stockholm First North line (H100) does not inherit it. On the same market-by-market test, Euronext Growth Paris (Capital B) and Deutsche Börse's Open Market / Scale segment (Bitcoin Group SE) each have to be checked as themselves rather than assumed either way, and US OTC quotations are not covered — so Metaplanet's MTPLF quotation would not be ISA-eligible even where a broker offers it, while the Tokyo 3350 line in principle would be. Verify every venue against HMRC's current list before you rely on this: the list changes, and our venue classification here is inference from listing segment, not a checked HMRC determination for each company.
Recognition is not availability. HMRC recognising an exchange does not mean your platform offers dealing on it. In practice UK brokers offer the Nasdaq and NYSE lines with a W-8BEN in place; very few offer direct Tokyo, Hong Kong, Euronext Growth or Canadian Securities Exchange dealing, and many restrict low-priced or repeatedly reverse-split US micro-caps. Several names on this page — PowerCompute at 1,794,135 shares outstanding, for instance — are nano-caps where spread and liquidity risk are severe.
No compensation scheme covers a market loss, and no ombudsman will fix one. The Financial Services Compensation Scheme is narrower than people assume, but it is not nothing. It does pay protected investment claims, up to £85,000 per person per firm, where an FCA-authorised firm has failed and owes you a civil liability — bad advice, misrepresentation, or a failure to return client assets when a platform collapses. What it does not do is make good a fall in market value. It is not a backstop for a coin falling, a premium collapsing, a preferred dividend being skipped, a lender liquidating pledged collateral, or a company restructuring its obligations — those are investment outcomes, not firm failures. The Financial Ombudsman Service considers complaints about how a UK-regulated firm treated you; it does not make good the loss on a US-listed share whose treasury went down. Where these securities are listed overseas, UK protections are further removed still. If the coin falls, or the premium collapses, or the company restructures, the loss is yours. The FCA's own material on cryptoassets is at fca.org.uk.
Sources and the limits of this snapshot
Every holdings figure above is attributed to a document, a date and an evidence grade. Where we could only find a company press release, a third-party tracker or conflicting reports, we have said so in the row rather than smoothing it into a clean number. Where a figure could not be verified at all — Upexi's current solana position, TAO Synergies' and GameSquare's current holdings, Solana Company's holdings, Galaxy's net own-account bitcoin, Bitcoin Group SE's and H100's counts, DDC's as-at date — we have left the gap visible rather than filling it.
Known open questions at the snapshot date, stated so you can close them yourself:
- Metaplanet's August 2026 coin movements were unresolved. A reported movement of roughly 5,014 BTC before results was denied as a sale by the CEO, and 1,000 BTC moved to Coinbase Prime on 25 August 2026 was classified as a deposit rather than a confirmed sale, because Coinbase Prime provides both custody and financing. The next holdings disclosure settles it.
- Boyaa's H1 2026 interim results were approved at a board meeting on 20 August 2026 and were due within days of our cut-off. Our primary-verified figure is 4,093 BTC at 31 March 2026.
- Hyperliquid Strategies' first audited holdings, for the year ended 30 June 2026, were scheduled for 27 August 2026 — one day after this snapshot.
- Whether the Evernorth SPAC merger has closed and XRPN has begun trading was not confirmed.
- Keel's 1,861 BTC at 7 August 2026 is press-reported from an exhibit we have linked but did not read in full.
- Monthly production disclosures from MARA, Riot and CleanSpark appear to have stopped appearing on EDGAR for July 2026; check company investor-relations pages directly if monthly figures matter to you.
All of this decays fast. MARA is the proof: within five weeks of the 30 June balance sheet date the encumbered share of its holdings went from 26% to over half. Every figure on this page should be re-derived from the filings for the September 2026 quarter, which companies publish in late October and early November 2026.
What this page deliberately does not do: forecast any price, rank these companies, describe any of them as an opportunity, or suggest an allocation. It is a description of what a set of public documents said on one particular day about a fast-moving, speculative and heavily promoted corner of the market. Stated corporate targets quoted anywhere above — Capital B's 15,000 BTC by 2027, DDC's 5,000 BTC by end-2026, Metaplanet's 100,000 and 210,000 BTC, BitMine's 5% of ether supply — are company promotional claims, not commitments, and several are arithmetically hard to reconcile with a sub-1.0 mNAV, because the financing mechanism that would deliver them is the one that has stopped working. If you are considering any of this with money that matters, take regulated advice.
Related guides on digital assets and tax
The companion pages on treasury companies are each linked once, in context above: the mechanism explainer, mNAV, what goes wrong, the UK-listed directory and the UK digital assets primer. Elsewhere on the site:
How UK Tax Drag holds itself to account
Pages are checked against the primary sources listed on each page and reviewed by the Editor; corrections are logged in the changelog. Pages are drafted with the help of AI tools (how AI is used). No affiliate revenue. No sponsored content. No paid placements.
UK Tax Drag is an independent publication by Finsolve Consulting Limited, not affiliated with or endorsed by HMRC, GOV.UK or any government body.