Bitcoin treasury companies: top holders and yield

Public companies held 1.27 million BTC on 24 September 2026, most of it earning nothing, and the few treasuries that do earn a return rely on options, staking, basis trades or carry, each with its own custody and control requirements.

A bitcoin treasury company is a listed company that holds bitcoin as its main reserve asset and raises equity, debt or preferred stock to buy more of it. On 24 September 2026, 197 public companies held about 1.273 million BTC, valued at roughly $107 billion, according to bitcointreasuries.net, and Strategy alone held 846,000 BTC. Bitcoin itself pays no interest, so a treasury only earns a return by putting its BTC to work through options, lending, basis trades, staking protocols or vaults. Each route adds a counterparty or a contract, which is why the controls around the BTC matter as much as the rate.

The same model now runs on other assets. Companies holding ether, solana and other tokens are grouped with the bitcoin holders as digital asset treasury companies, or DATs, and the ETH treasuries have gone furthest in earning yield because ether can be staked directly.

What is a digital asset treasury company?

A digital asset treasury company holds a crypto asset as its primary treasury reserve and treats growing that holding per share as its main objective. Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) set the template in 2020, and by September 2026 the category covered miners, exchanges and dozens of companies that converted an existing listing into a treasury vehicle. Bitcoin accounted for 93.6% of the treasury holdings tracked by bitcointreasuries.net on 24 September 2026, with ETH at 5.6% and SOL, BNB and XRP making up the rest.

Investors buy DAT shares for exposure to the underlying asset inside a brokerage account, often with the hope that the company can add more of the asset per share over time than a spot ETF can. Strategy reports this as BTC Yield, the growth in bitcoin held per share, which is a company metric and has nothing to do with income earned on the bitcoin itself.

The largest bitcoin treasury companies

Holdings and mNAV from bitcointreasuries.net on 24 September 2026, valued at its BTC price of $84,130. Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company (BSTR) is listed with 30,021 BTC but without a rank, and mNAV is shown only where the site publishes it. Strategy holds about two thirds of all bitcoin on public company balance sheets and just over 4% of the 21 million BTC that will ever exist.

The list mixes two kinds of holder. Miners such as MARA and CleanSpark accumulate bitcoin they produce, and operating businesses such as Coinbase, Tesla and Block hold it alongside a much larger core business. The pure treasury companies, Strategy, Twenty One, Metaplanet and Strive among them, exist mainly to hold bitcoin, so their share price trades as a multiple of their BTC.

What is mNAV, and what happens when it drops below 1?

mNAV is a treasury company's valuation divided by the market value of the crypto it holds. Some trackers use market capitalisation on top, and bitcointreasuries.net uses enterprise value, which adds debt and preferred stock and subtracts cash. That explains why Strategy showed an mNAV of 1.13 on 24 September 2026 even though its market capitalisation of about $61.8 billion sat below the $71.2 billion value of its bitcoin (enterprise value basis per the site; the calculation is our reading of its columns).

Above 1, a company can sell new shares for more than the bitcoin they represent and use the proceeds to buy BTC, which raises bitcoin per share for existing holders. Below 1, the same issuance dilutes bitcoin per share, so the growth engine stalls. Twenty One (0.73), Metaplanet (0.78) and Nakamoto (0.90) all traded below 1 on 24 September 2026.

A company in that position has three main levers, which are to buy back shares, sell bitcoin to fund buybacks or obligations, or find income that doesn't depend on raising new capital. Strategy's board authorised up to $1.25 billion of bitcoin sales on 29 June 2026 to fund dividends, interest and buybacks under what it called a Digital Credit Capital Framework, and raised the dividend on its STRC preferred stock to 12% at the same time (The Defiant). Preferred dividends and debt interest are fixed cash costs, and a treasury whose bitcoin earns nothing has to meet them from new issuance, cash reserves or asset sales. That gap is why yield on treasury assets has become a board-level topic for the pure treasury companies.

How should a bitcoin treasury company be valued?

A treasury company's value starts from its crypto, adjusted for whatever it can do with that crypto that a holder can't do alone. Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan set out that framework in a thread on X in November 2025, arguing that mNAV on its own misleads because it ignores where a company is in its life. A treasury that announced it would wind down and hand back its bitcoin would trade at exactly the value of that bitcoin, an mNAV of 1, so the question becomes what pulls a going concern above or below that line.

Hougan names three forces that push toward a discount, which are illiquidity, since shareholders can't get at the underlying assets, operating expenses and execution risk, and he notes that "expenses and risk compound over time" for a company that plans to hold forever. Against them he sees one reason for a premium, which is the company's ability to grow the amount of crypto behind each share. He lists four ways to do that: issuing debt, lending the tokens, running options strategies and buying assets at a discount, each of which he says "only work in the right conditions."

Two of those four levers are yield on the treasury itself, which is why the question of where and how a treasury deploys its bitcoin now feeds straight into its valuation. Hougan made the same point more bluntly in an earlier thread, writing that "buying a crypto asset and putting it on a balance sheet today isn't hard," and that "if that's all a DAT is doing, you are better off owning an ETF," so a premium has to be earned by doing something an ETF can't. On 24 September 2026 the market was already splitting along those lines, with Twenty One, Metaplanet and Nakamoto below an mNAV of 1 while Strategy (1.13) and Strive (1.42) still held premiums.

Matt Hougan@Matt_Hougan · CIO, Bitwise · 5 Nov 2025 1/ A lot of people have asked me what I think of DATS. My view: Some DATs should trade above NAV and others should trade below NAV. A thread on how to tell the difference. Read the full thread on X

Can bitcoin treasury companies earn yield?

Yes, though bitcoin pays nothing on its own chain, so every return comes from lending it, trading around it or pledging it to secure something else. The routes available to a listed treasury differ widely in rate, custody and what the company gives up.

Sources: DefiLlama (Aave, Babylon), Binance funding history, Yahoo Finance (Metaplanet). The lending row shows why most treasuries leave BTC idle, since supplying it to the largest DeFi market earned $3 a year per $100,000. The routes with meaningful returns all involve selling optionality, taking a hedged trading position or borrowing against the BTC, and each of those changes what the company actually owns at any given moment.

How Metaplanet earns income on its bitcoin

Metaplanet is the clearest example of a bitcoin treasury running a yield business at scale. The Tokyo-listed company sells bitcoin options through a unit it calls Bitcoin Income Generation, using its BTC holdings as collateral, and forecast in January 2026 that the unit would produce 97.5% of its projected FY2026 revenue of about ¥16 billion (CoinDesk).

The income moves with option premiums, which follow volatility. The unit booked ¥1.747 billion in Q2 FY2026, down 41% from ¥2.969 billion the quarter before and from a peak of ¥4.242 billion in Q4 FY2025, as the company's holdings reached 43,000 BTC in July 2026 (Yahoo Finance). Options income is real revenue for a treasury, though it can't be relied on as a fixed source of cash for fixed obligations.

Where ETH treasury companies get their yield

ETH treasuries earn yield mainly from staking, which pays rewards for validating the Ethereum network and needs no borrower on the other side. That makes their position different from bitcoin treasuries, whose asset has no native reward to collect.

• BitMine (BMNR): held 5,956,378 ETH on 13 September 2026, of which 5,067,309 ETH (85%) was staked, largely through its own MAVAN validator network. It reported a 7-day staking yield of 2.62% annualised and projected annual staking revenue of about $334 million (BitMine release, 14 Sep 2026).
• BitMine preferred stock: the company's 9.50% Series A perpetual preferred (BMNP) pays dividends weekly, and chairman Tom Lee said in June 2026 that projected staking rewards "provide recurring cash flow to support the dividends". The dividend is set as a percentage of the preferred's stated amount, while staking pays a percentage of the ETH staked, so coverage depends on how much preferred is outstanding against the ETH that backs it.
• Sharplink (SBET): held 892,127 ETH on 21 September 2026 and says it has staked all of its ETH since launching the strategy, earning 27,945 ETH in cumulative staking rewards (Sharplink dashboard). In August 2026 it moved $200 million of ETH into Lido's wstETH, held with Anchorage Digital, to use the staked token in DeFi.

Staking isn't free of risk. Validators can be slashed for faults, exits from the validator queue can take days or weeks, and a liquid staking token adds the contract risk of the protocol that issues it.

What controls a treasury company needs before deploying BTC

A listed company deploying treasury assets has a board, auditors and shareholders to answer to, so the questions start with control and only then move to rate. The set-up that holds up in due diligence generally covers the following.

• Custody: who holds the BTC at each step, whether it sits with a qualified custodian in a segregated account, and whether it has to be wrapped into a token such as WBTC or cbBTC to reach the strategy. Onchain yield in qualified custody covers how assets can stay with a custodian while earning.
• Sole-depositor or whitelisted vault: a vault that only the company, or a set list of approved addresses, can deposit into, so no other depositor's redemptions or losses affect the treasury's position. The difference is set out in segregated vs co-mingled vault accounts.
• Policy engine: onchain rules that restrict which chains, protocols, tokens and contract functions the strategy can touch, so a board-approved mandate is enforced by code and not only by the manager's discretion.
• Signing and approvals: who can move funds or change parameters, with a multisig owner, MPC-held operator keys, pre-transaction simulation and maker-checker approval on each action.
• Liquidity terms: how long redemption takes, measured against the company's own cash needs. Lombard's LBTC, for example, takes up to 10 days to redeem for native BTC.
• Loan limits: for carry or borrowing strategies, the maximum loan-to-value and the BTC price at which liquidation starts.
• Reporting and audit: position-level reporting an auditor can reconcile, and a view on whether lending or wrapping the BTC changes its accounting treatment, which is a matter for the company's auditors.

Upshift builds whitelisted and sole-depositor vaults for treasuries and allocators, with a policy engine that restricts chains, protocols, tokens and functions, a Gnosis Safe multisig as vault owner and operator keys held in MPC. Its contracts have had 10 smart contract audits by 6 independent firms, and its parent August Digital provides onchain prime brokerage and credit. Sentora BTC, a vault Upshift operates on Ethereum, shows the carry route in practice: on 24 September 2026 it held about $3.9 million of WBTC as collateral on Morpho and had borrowed RLUSD and PYUSD against part of it to deploy into stablecoin strategies.

Risks of earning yield on treasury bitcoin

• Counterparty risk: exchanges, prime brokers and lenders can fail, and Celsius and BlockFi both froze bitcoin deposits in 2022.
• Wrapper and bridge risk: wrapped BTC depends on its custodian or signer network. The trade-offs are compared in how to earn yield on bitcoin.
• Liquidation risk: borrowing against BTC means a sharp price fall can close the position at a loss.
• Strategy risk: option sellers give up upside or take on assignment, and basis trades lose money when funding turns negative.
• Contract risk: vaults, staking protocols and lending markets run on smart contracts that can have bugs, and Upshift doesn't carry smart contract insurance.

Always make sure to do your own research and be aware of the above and any other risks before depositing.

Frequently asked questions

What is a bitcoin treasury company?

A public company that holds bitcoin as its main reserve asset and raises capital to buy more. Strategy is the largest, with 846,000 BTC on 24 September 2026.

How many public companies hold bitcoin?

197 public companies held about 1.273 million BTC on 24 September 2026, according to bitcointreasuries.net.

What does mNAV mean?

A treasury company's market value, or enterprise value, divided by the value of the crypto it holds. Below 1, the shares are valued below the company's crypto, and issuing new shares to buy more dilutes existing holders.

Do bitcoin treasury companies earn yield on their BTC?

Most don't. Those that do use options, basis trades, BTC staking protocols, lending or carry strategies. Metaplanet's options business is the largest example among pure bitcoin treasuries.

How do ETH treasury companies pay dividends on preferred stock?

BitMine says staking rewards on its ETH provide recurring cash flow that supports the weekly dividends on its 9.50% BMNP preferred stock. Staking yielded about 2.62% annualised in mid-September 2026.

What is a digital asset treasury?

A company treasury built around a crypto asset such as BTC, ETH or SOL, held as the primary reserve. Bitcoin makes up about 94% of the treasury holdings tracked by bitcointreasuries.net.

Keep reading

• How to earn yield on bitcoin. The routes and risks for any BTC holder.
• How companies earn yield on idle treasury cash. The same question for stablecoin and dollar balances.
• How Kraken Institutional clients access onchain yield. Earning from inside a custody account.
• How onchain yield vaults are secured. Audits, access controls and policy engines.