Bitcoin treasury companies lose $80B as business model unwinds

For about 18 months, the playbook seemed bulletproof: buy Bitcoin, tell Wall Street about it, watch your stock price rip. That playbook just lost $80 billion. The 50 largest public companies holding Bitcoin on their balance sheets saw their combined market capitalization plummet from $150 billion in July 2025 to just $67 billion by August 2026, according to the Financial Times. The digital asset treasury model, which turned obscure software firms and shell companies into proxy Bitcoin ETFs with leverage, is now unwinding in spectacular fashion. Strategy’s outsized collapse If one company defined the Bitcoin treasury era, it was Strategy, the firm formerly known as MicroStrategy. And its decline accounts for nearly all of the carnage. Strategy alone lost approximately $79 billion from its peak valuation. That means virtually the entire $83 billion wipeout across the top 50 can be traced back to a single company’s stock deflating. Of the 50 largest Bitcoin treasury companies, 43 are now trading below the share prices they had before they pivoted to a Bitcoin-centric strategy. That’s 86% of the cohort performing worse than if they’d simply done nothing. Even more painful: 35 of those ...