Bitcoin treasury companies: top holders and yield

Public companies held 1.25 million BTC on 5 November 2026, and most of it earned nothing. The few treasuries that do earn a return rely on options, staking, basis trades or carry, and each route has 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 5 November 2026, 198 public companies held about 1.253 million BTC, valued at roughly $100 billion, according to bitcointreasuries.net, and Strategy alone held 849,327 BTC. Bitcoin itself pays no interest. 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. The ETH treasuries have gone furthest in earning yield, because ether can be staked directly.

How can a bitcoin treasury company earn yield on its BTC?

It depends on what the board is willing to give up. A treasury that wants to keep full upside can lend BTC onchain, at a rate close to zero. One that can cap its upside can sell options on its BTC, as Metaplanet does. One that can run a hedged position can collect perpetual futures funding through a basis trade. One that wants stablecoin income without selling BTC can borrow against it inside a whitelisted vault and accept liquidation risk. ETH treasuries can simply stake.

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. By September 2026 the category covered miners, exchanges and dozens of companies that had turned an existing listing into a treasury vehicle. Bitcoin accounted for 93.7% of the treasury holdings tracked by bitcointreasuries.net on 5 November 2026, with ETH at 5.5% and SOL, BNB and XRP making up the rest.

Investors buy DAT shares to hold the underlying asset inside a brokerage account. Many also hope 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. It's 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 5 November 2026, valued at its BTC price of $80,223. 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. 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. On that basis Strategy showed an mNAV of 1.10 on 5 November 2026, even though its market capitalisation of about $60.2 billion sat below the $68.1 billion value of its bitcoin. (The enterprise value basis is the site's; 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. That raises bitcoin per share for existing holders. Below 1, the same issuance dilutes bitcoin per share and the growth engine stalls. Twenty One (0.68), Metaplanet (0.70), Strive (0.91) and Nakamoto (0.78) all traded below 1 on 5 November 2026.

A company in that position can 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. At the same time it raised the dividend on its STRC preferred stock to 12% (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. For the pure treasury companies, that gap has made yield on treasury assets a board-level topic.

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. He argued 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.

Hougan names three forces that push a going concern toward a discount: illiquidity (shareholders can't get at the underlying assets), operating expenses and execution risk. 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 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. 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." A premium has to be earned by doing something an ETF can't. By 5 November 2026 the market was already splitting along those lines. Twenty One, Metaplanet, Strive and Nakamoto traded below an mNAV of 1, while Strategy (1.10) still held a premium.

Can bitcoin treasury companies earn yield?

Yes, though bitcoin pays nothing on its own chain. 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). Most treasuries leave BTC idle for a plain reason: 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. Each of those changes what the company 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. In January 2026 it forecast 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 well off its ¥4.242 billion peak in Q4 FY2025. The company's holdings had reached 43,000 BTC by 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 6,060,506 ETH on 1 November 2026, of which 5,227,037 ETH (86%) was staked, largely through its own MAVAN validator network. It reported a 7-day staking yield of 3.03% annualised and projected annual staking revenue of about $358 million (BitMine release, 2 Nov 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. Coverage depends on how much preferred is outstanding against the ETH that backs it.
• Sharplink (SBET): held 895,117 ETH on 2 November 2026 and says it has staked all of its ETH since launching the strategy, earning 30,934 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, and exits from the validator queue can take days or weeks. A liquid staking token also 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 answers to a board, auditors and shareholders. 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. 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. Code enforces the board-approved mandate on top of 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. A policy engine restricts chains, protocols, tokens and functions, a Gnosis Safe multisig owns each vault, and operator keys sit in MPC. Its contracts have had 11 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, runs the carry route. On 5 November 2026 it held about $2.9 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 849,327 BTC on 5 November 2026.

How many public companies hold bitcoin?

198 public companies held about 1.253 million BTC on 5 November 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 3.03% annualised (7-day) in early November 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.