'Sell Shovels': This Firm Makes Dashboards for Strategy and Dozens of Bitcoin Treasuries

As Bitcoin treasury firms proliferate in the U.S., an engineer-by-day is building dashboards for them on the other side of the world and cashing in on the industry’s latest craze.

For a while, mNAV was called MicroStrategist, but its recent rebrand reflects a newfound focus on dozens of Bitcoin-buying firms, and counting, according to co-founder and company director Marty Kendall, who lives in Australia.

“In a gold rush, sell shovels,” he told Decrypt. “Every company needs clarity and transparency, and they really have to build to make a dashboard work.”

The company’s new name is shorthand for multiple-to-net asset value, an informal yet popular standard for assessing Bitcoin treasury firms. It weighs a company’s market capitalization against the value of its digital asset holdings, but that’s just one metric that mNAV offers.

This year, cannabis cultivators, distilleries, and healthcare devices companies, among others, have emerged as new buyers of digital assets, while trying to emulate Strategy, the world’s largest corporate holder of Bitcoin. They often focus on growing the amount of cryptocurrency owned per share.

Some analysts have highlighted signs of investor fatigue, but Kendall views the firms as key vehicles for Bitcoin’s adoption (beyond products like exchange-traded funds).

“I’m fundamentally a Bitcoin believer in what it can give to the world,” he said. “I want to see Bitcoin morph into its final form, and the treasury companies are part of that story.”

The first dashboard that mNAV made was for Capital B. Investors can toggle between metrics reflected in USD and EUR, and beyond mNAV (the metric), gauge things like the performance of Capital B shares relative to Bitcoin or progress toward its accumulation goal.

“Everybody loved that,” he said, adding that it led to opportunities with other organizations, as well as Bitcoin for Corporations, which bills itself as an executive network.

Bitcoin for Corporations’ website shows mNAV-powered dashboards for 17 Bitcoin-buying firms, from Strategy’s $79 billion stockpile to Locate Technologies’ $1.5 million stash. Kendall noted that mNAV has struck several deals with individual companies.

Strategy is a prominent member of Bitcoin for Corporations, but the dashboard on its website doesn’t mention mNAV (the company) and draws data from Polygon.io.

Eventually, mNAV could provide investors with analysis on Bitcoin treasury firms, Kendall said. The company was moving in that direction before its Capital B dashboard “blew up,” he added.

Instead of sifting through SEC filings or making spreadsheets on their own, Kendall said mNAV has the potential to help, servicing Bitcoin-buying firms and individual investors alike.

“The depth of analysis on Twitter is so shallow,” he said. “There’s a lot of hopium, and that can be risky, but there’s a lot of opportunity too, if you know how to play it.”

Kendall said he has spent “way too much” time researching Strategy as an individual and owns shares in the Bitcoin-buying firm, while having “dabbled with a few others.”

“It’s a personal interest,” he said. “Engineers get obsessed with topics solving novel problems, so that’s fundamentally at the heart of what we’re doing and trying to share that with people.”