A small but growing number of companies are moving away from holding Bitcoin as static reserves. They integrate it into their capital strategies and use it to raise capital, secure credit, and design returns. These digital asset treasuries (DATs) are the first laboratories to test how decentralized assets function as productive capital within the architecture of corporate finance.
This phenomenon started with strategy, but has since spread. Japan’s Metaplanet, France’s Blockchain Group, and Europe’s Twenty One Capital are all major examples of companies that have developed models that position Bitcoin as a practical financial product rather than just an investment. Their experiments are accelerating the larger process of financializing Bitcoin, and by extension, other tokens.
From assets to balance sheet infrastructure
Historically, Bitcoin has served as an alternative store of value, an uncorrelated hedge against currency depreciation. DAT extends that equation. By using Bitcoin to access liquidity through loans, convertible bonds, and fund structures, we treat Bitcoin as programmable collateral and a productive asset. This shift from ownership to usage marks Bitcoin’s entry into mainstream corporate finance.
Issuing convertible debt has become a common feature of this strategy. Zero-coupon bonds and equity-linked bonds allow companies to raise fiat capital while maintaining upside exposure to Bitcoin appreciation. Investors gain the potential for asymmetric payoffs, while issuers optimize their cost of capital. This is a reversal of the traditional view that volatility is purely a risk factor. In this new model, upward volatility becomes part of the value proposition.
Measuring resilience with mNAV
To evaluate these new financial models, investors have begun to rely on a metric known as market net asset value (mNAV). It is a measure of how effectively a company converts its digital holdings into real, productive capital.
The key to understanding the sustainability of these strategies lies in their market net asset value (mNAV) multiples. Bridging traditional valuation logic and cryptocurrency market dynamics.
DAT’s mNAV is directly correlated to the price of the underlying asset, which explains much of the short-term volatility in stock valuations for these companies. However, the most important thing is not the absolute level of mNAV, but the willingness of multiple investors to allocate to the absolute level of mNAV. This multiple reflects confidence in the company’s ability to generate “alpha” beyond Bitcoin’s underlying performance through disciplined capital allocation, balance sheet engineering, and incremental yield generation.
If mNAV multiples are compressed on average, it indicates that the market values risk management over speculation. When a particular company’s multiple falls, it highlights idiosyncratic risks. Recent data shows both patterns. DAT, which has pursued aggressive debt issuance and relied on frequent equity dilution, has an mNAV multiple of less than 1x, suggesting investors are skeptical about the sustainability of its approach. Conversely, companies that maintain liquidity buffers and diversified financial structures maintain premiums, albeit at slightly reduced levels, demonstrating the market’s emphasis on prudence and operating discipline, even in a high-beta environment.
In this sense, mNAV serves as a new price-to-book multiple for digital asset finance, an institutional standard that distinguishes financial management from opportunism.
New discipline for new assets
The integration of Bitcoin into financial management also imposes new constraints. Currently, DAT stock is moving roughly in lockstep with Bitcoin, amplifying volatility. While this association is inevitable, the difference between vulnerability and resilience lies in structure. That is, how companies manage liquidity related to debt, equity issuance, and crypto exposure.
A well-managed DAT will take lessons from traditional finance, stress testing leverage ratios, setting hedging limits, implementing forward-looking cash flow and liquidity management schemes, and establishing a risk committee to manage cryptocurrency positions with the same rigor applied to FX, commodities, and other traditional assets. In this way, Bitcoin moves from a speculative position to a managed component of financial infrastructure.
Institutional similarities
Similar rebalancing can be seen outside of corporations. Currently, various crypto foundations are offering financial management that combines native tokens with traditional assets such as cash, ETFs, and bonds. Their objective is not to reduce digital exposure, but to stabilize it, which is the logically similar approach to multi-asset portfolio theory.
In traditional finance, asset managers diversify currencies, commodities, and credit to optimize liquidity and duration. DAT is now replicating this logic on-chain, blending native and fiat assets to achieve the same objective. The difference is that Bitcoin is no longer peripheral to that process, but at its core.
From corporate to sovereign
These dynamics are no longer limited to the private sector. The US government announcing a strategic Bitcoin reserve, US states like New Hampshire and Texas being the first to follow suit, and Luxembourg’s generational sovereign wealth fund investing 1% of its holdings in Bitcoin are modest steps. But they also illustrate how Bitcoin adoption could extend into public finance, from a store of value via programmable collateral to ultimately a productive asset, as pioneered by corporations.
When treasuries and institutions begin holding Bitcoin as part of their long-term reserves, the asset moves from speculative wealth to the category of available financial infrastructure. At that point, the conversation is no longer about adoption, but about integration on how to manage, lend, and collateralize Bitcoin within a regulated framework.
the way to go
Bitcoin will remain volatile. That’s its nature. But volatility doesn’t preclude practicality. All you need is sophistication. More funds, loans, derivative markets and structured products are being built around it, each adding depth to the mature market.
DAT is where this new system will first be pressure tested. Their success will not depend on how much Bitcoin they accumulate, but on how effectively they convert volatility into capital efficiency, using transparency, balanced reserves, and disciplined financial management to build trust.
In that sense, digital asset treasury can be seen as a testing ground for the next step towards the institutional adoption of Bitcoin. Its evolution will show us how quickly the world’s first digital asset can become not only a store of value, but also a functioning building block of modern finance.
