Since the start of the year, the number of bitcoin (BTC) treasury stocks — publicly listed companies that own BTC — has increased 131% from 73 to 169.
Their BTC holdings have increased 67% from 590,649 to 984,535, and the value of their BTC has doubled from $56 billion to $112 billion.
Nevertheless, BTC itself doesn’t seem to be appreciating from this inundation. Rather than amplify the momentum of these capital inflows, spot investors are fading these bids.
Indeed, BTC is languishing 8% below its all-time high and is only up 19% year to date.
That 19% is just 11 percentage points above the benchmark S&P 500 Index which has appreciated 8% since New Year’s Day. For all the downside risk and volatility that BTC investors must endure in a sub-$2.3 trillion speculative asset, its 1,100 basis point S&P 500 outperformance seems particularly muted against the world’s preeminent, $54 trillion index.
Treasury companies raised about $10 billion for BTC acquisitions this year, yet their fundraises have done little to boost the spot price.
Read more: The global web tied to MicroStrategy’s $71B bitcoin stash
Crabbish prices as BTC shuffles sideways from private to public
Protos has already covered a subtle mechanism that explains the poor pricing boost of BTC treasury company purchases. Specifically, there has been substantial shuffling of BTC from private to public companies.
Although percentages appear impressive when counting public treasury stocks by themselves — see the 131%, 67%, and 100% figures in this article’s opening paragraph — those percentages shrink embarrassingly when expanding the calculations to include private companies.
As of Protos’ July 1 analysis, for example, the moderate 14% increase in BTC holdings between public and private bitcoin treasury companies was identical to the year-to-date rally of BTC itself.
Updating that calculation to August 20 reveals similar underperformance.
Since the start of the year, and after adjusting for the shuffling of BTC from private to public companies, BTC holdings have increased just 28% from 1,000,481 to 1,278,662 BTC.
Obviously, that 28% figure is far smaller than the public-only figure of 67%. The massive reduction illustrates how much BTC has simply shuffled from private to public corporations in order to take advantage of investment premiums in public equities.
Nakamoto, whose shares once traded as high as 23x the value of its BTC holdings, is 70% below its May 2025 high. Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) is down 25% from its high this year.
From their May 2025 highs, Twenty One is down 59%, Asset Entities is down 71%, Semler Scientific is down 37%, and MetaPlanet is down 64%.