“Just buy an ETF.” The blunt advice from Strive Asset Management CEO Matt Cole under a panel in Hong Kong’s Bitcoin Asia In August, the growing frustration of Digital Asset Treasuries (DAT) summarized the business vehicles that promise to surpass Bitcoin Through smart funding and balance technology, but so far struggles to do well with this promise.
Bitcoin itself is up approx. 23% this year. Still, most digital asset chains, including micro strategy, Semler Scientific, Gamestop and Trump Media, have poorly drawn both BTC and ETFS tracking of it. Only a few outliers, such as Twenty One Capital and Japan’s Metaplanet, which have been prone to volatility, have managed to beat the benchmark.
This hole exposes the basic weakness of the DAT trade. These companies were built to surpass BTC through gearing, financing or operational alpha, but most are limping the simplest possible exposure.
Pitch of Suppled Beta with Balance Discipline works only when capital awards, convertible and debt markets remain friendly. Think about what toxic strategy $ 8 billion in debt would look like if there was a rise. With an average coupon of only 0.42% and maturity that extends over four years, these bonds see manageable today, but that comfort disappears in a higher rate world.
Although the headlines come through crypto entrepreneurs daily who take over a shell company and pump their balance full of BTC, the warnings grow higher and higher.
Galaxy Digital has warned that the entire structure depends on a sustained premium for the net value, a reflexive setup reminiscent of the 1920s investment trust boom. Newly has been equally critical and argued that the industry’s preferred “mnav” metric mask obligations and inflated exposure per year. Share by assuming debt conversions that never happen.
None of this means Corporate Bitcoin adoption is a Mirage; It grows faster than ever. There are almost 40% more public companies holding Bitcoin today than there were three months ago, according to data prepared by Bitwise.
Some of these companies are real companies that have BTC in the balance because of the nature of their industry, such as Coinbase, Bullish (Bullish is the parent company in Coindesk) or BTC mine workers like Mara. Others have it as a hedge against Fiatustability.
But so many companies on Bitwise’s list are BTC DATS and it is important to differentiate these from other DATs showing proof-of-stake altcoins like ETH or Solana. This is another offer.
By putting native assets and operating valiators, these DAT’s yield does not earn from leverage, but from the network activity itself. For example, owning an ETH or TRX DAT would get exposure to Ethereum or Tron – the networks on which the stablecoin revolution lives. In theory, this exposure transforms treasuries into miniature ecosystems that are composed value as network scales.
Trons Listco, SRM, now Tron Inc after a rocky start, shows how this is done. Almost half of the USDT activity lives on throne, so if investors want a ‘visum moment’ for USDT – especially in the most exciting markets for stablecoins such as Latin America – Tron Inc is a dat that suits this bill.
Still, that kind of exposure on-chain is still the exception, not the rule. Most dats have not figured out how to translate balance size into operational yield or network participation. They should be smarter than ETFs, capital -efficient, yield -bearing and tied to the real economic flow of blockchains, but many remain a little more than geared clerks to Bitcoin beta.
Until several treasurers can prove that they can put together capital faster than a passive ETF, the simplest takeaway from the Hong Kong scene can remain the best: just buy ETF.
