Are Digital Asset Treasuries (Dats) Just A Fading Fad?

What Happened

Investors seem to be hitting the sell button on these public companies when, not too long ago, they were darlings. DATs have certainly had a moment in 2025. But has that moment already come and gone?

The DAT craze likely got hot because they gave investors a venue to access crypto without ever having to fuddle with wallets, exchanges, or a myriad of chains, noted Jean-Marc Bonnefous, Managing Partner of Tellurian Capital.

“DATs, being listed companies, are a convenient, compliant, ready to use way for US institutional investors to buy crypto assets without any significant changes to their existing mandate and operational workflows,” Bonnefous told BeInCrypto.

However, some institutional investors may be experiencing buyer’s remorse on DATs now, as the market for both crypto and traditional assets is down.

Investors looking at newer DATs need to be examining Net Asset Value (NAV) and Market Cap to Net-Asset-Value (mNAV) as a key evaluation tool.

It’s entirely possible that many investors didn’t understand the massive amount of leverage that happens in the crypto market.

There is also an argument that investors do understand there’s a lot of leverage in crypto, and plain old greed is what caused the runup and subsequent rundown.

“DATs are seen as a leverage bet on the underlying assets’ ecosystems, allowing investors to potentially compound gains,” said Alex Bergeron of Ark Labs, a Bitcoin Layer-2 solution. “Obviously, this leverage creates an amplified price impact on the downside as well.”

Market Context

A wave of companies holding crypto on their balance sheet arrived in 2025. Driven by Trump’s pro-crypto policies, several traditional businesses bet big on crypto, whether through mergers or by going public in the US stock market.

“Strategy had decades of revenue, deep capital-markets relationships, and moved early enough to build a massive Bitcoin position that gave it credibility and cheap financing,” said Maja Vujinovic, CEO of ETH accumulator FG Nexus (NASDAQ: FGNX). “Newer DATs don’t have that advantage”.

“NAV is the simple ‘what is the crypto worth today?’ number,” Vujinovic told BeInCrypto. “mNAV is what the market is willing to pay on top of that for the company’s strategy, credibility, and execution.”

Interestingly enough, the peak of DAT mania in 2025 may have crested on October 10, around the time a massive wave of liquidations wiped out $19 billion in crypto market value.

Why It Matters

Yet Strategy may fare better than its rivals with way less experience in the crypto treasury space.

Details

However, it appears that “DATs” or Digital Asset Treasuries are losing momentum, as many are seeing their stock values plummet.

All About the Access

Big-time DAT names like Bitcoin’s MicroStrategy, Ethereum’s Bitmine, and Solana’s Forward Industries are down big the past month.

All of this was initially sparked by MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) back in 2020, when its CEO, Michael Saylor, during the pandemic-era money printing, decided to convert some of his company’s cash to BTC.

Strategy currently owns 649,870 bitcoin as of this writing, with an average cost of $74,430 per bitcoin.

Eyeballing the NAV and mNAV

Its largely globally unregulated nature allows traders to take 100x bets, which can cause sweeping auto-deleverages, as was the case on October 10.

Since then, NAV has declined from an October high of nearly $120 billion to less than $80 billion, according to data aggregator Artemis.

DATs are Getting Diversified

Most DATs will need to do more than just hold crypto to run a revenue-producing business. That’s because if the valuation of the company is just based on NAV, they are going to trade at a discount.

There are expenses associated with running a company, such as operations and executive pay.