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Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) suffered a $17.4 billion loss in the final quarter of 2025, but just caught a major break from the public market index gods.
- MSTR posts $17.4 billion Q4 loss
- New BUCK token a proxy for a proxy-BTC bet
- MSCI won’t delist DATs from indexes … for now
- Bitmine seeks 100x share expansion
- Tom Lee, Fundstrat offering conflicting ETH forecasts?
- Bitmine helps clear Ethereum validator exit queue
In a January 5 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Michael Saylor’s Strategy announced that it suffered a $17.44 billion unrealized loss in the three months ending December 31. The jaw-dropping loss came courtesy of the significant decline in the fiat price of Strategy’s huge stack of BTC tokens that started shortly after the quarter began.
For 2025 as a whole, the picture is only slightly brighter, with Strategy predicting a $5.4 billion loss on its digital assets. BTC hit an all-time high of $126,080 on October 6 after starting the year at ~$94,000, but closed out 2025 closer to $88,000 after sinking as low as $82,000 in November.
Strategy claims its mNAV (the multiple of the value of its BTC vs. the company’s market capitalization) remains above the 1x danger zone, albeit just barely (1.02x as of midday Tuesday). Other, less conflicted sources, claim Strategy’s mNAV is 0.80x.
Strategy’s share price fell 53% during Q4 and fell another 4.1% on Tuesday, closing at $157.97. That’s a slight gain from its year-end price but barely one-third of its July 2025 peak of $457.
Undaunted, Strategy used the same SEC filing to reveal that it had spent $116 million buying another 1,283 BTC during the first four days of 2026. That brings Strategy’s total BTC stack to 673,783 tokens, purchased at an average price of $75,026. For the moment, that’s safely below BTC’s current price, but Strategy remains only one sustained sell-off from slipping into the red.
Strategy’s 2025 plan was to purchase additional BTC with funds raised via the five new preferred stock offerings it launched last year. But nearly all of Strategy’s recent purchases have been funded through the dilution of common MSTR shareholders, despite some of the preferred options offering investors dividends as high as 11%.
The company’s formerly mainstay business analytics software business is no great cash cow, so in December, Saylor tried to calm investors’ growing skepticism over his ability to pay these dividends.
This reassurance came in the formation of a ‘U.S. dollar reserve’ of $1.44 billion “to support the payment of dividends on its preferred stock and interest on its outstanding indebtedness.” That reserve, funded by still more dilution of existing MSTR shareholders, has since grown to $2.25 billion.
Bernstein analysts issued a note Tuesday saying Strategy’s sagging fortunes would likely rebound in tandem with BTC, which the analysts projected could hit $150,000 sometime this year. But a Mizuho survey found MSTR the clear favorite to be the fintech/crypto sectors’ worst institutional performer in 2026, while precisely nobody picked MSTR to be among 2026’s best performers.
BUCK token stops … where?
Despite the public’s waning desire for proxy betting on BTC via Strategy, proxy-proxy betting is now a thing. Buck Labs just announced the launch of BUCK, an “an indirectly Bitcoin-linked digital savings token” backed by shares of STRC, one of Strategy’s perpetual preferred shares.
Basically, Buck Labs will establish a STRC treasury—so, a BTC treasury once removed, making bank off those STRC dividends—and offer BUCK token holders a monthly ‘reward’ (currently 7% annually) payable in more BUCK tokens.
These rewards can be claimed without staking or lockups, pending governance token votes by the BUCK DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) and “subject to approval by Buck Foundation and the token Issuer.”
BUCK is issued on the Ethereum network and is “not backed by assets [not even STRC?] or pegged to any currency.” It also “does not constitute an e-money token, asset-referenced token, or a financial instrument.”
Based on the belief that ‘idle money is dead money,’ Buck CEO Travis VanderZanden claimed BUCK “isn’t a memecoin, and it’s not a promise of riches. It’s just a better default for how dollars should work in a Bitcoin world.” That world doesn’t include U.S. persons, as the Cayman-based Buck Labs says “regulatory restrictions” bar Yanks “at this time.”
Needless to say, Strategy execs are extremely bullish on BUCK’s possibilities. Buck Labs’ head of treasury, Dan Hillery, was also in a bullish mood, issuing an early-Tuesday tweet celebrating “Bitcoin having another strong day.” BTC was trading at $94,300 at the time, but fell below $92,000 three hours later. We’ll pause here to remind everyone that the final letters of Strategy’s five preferred stocks spell out F-C-K-E-D and let you ponder who the ‘U’ is in this scenario.
Desist the delist!
Hanging over Strategy like the sword of Damocles was this month’s scheduled decision by index provider MSCI about whether it would purge companies whose digital asset holdings account for over half their total assets. Potential banishment from major indexes, which was to be announced by January 15, could have sent already struggling DATs into a death spiral.
But after the markets closed Tuesday, MSCI jumped its own gun by announcing that it had “determined at this time not to implement the proposal to exclude [DATs] from the MSCI Global Investable Market Indexes.” DATs already listed in MSCI indexes will remain where they are for the time being, provided they continue to meet all other requirements.
But MSCI didn’t totally let DATs off the hook, saying feedback from its consultation “confirmed institutional investor concern that some DATCOs exhibit characteristics similar to investment funds, which are not eligible for inclusion in the MSCI Indexes. Feedback also highlighted that DATCOs may represent a subset of a wider group of entities whose business activities are predominantly investment-oriented rather than operational.”
As a result, MSCI “intends to open a broader consultation on the treatment of non-operating companies generally.” This review will ensure “consistency and continued alignment with the overall objectives of the MSCI Indexes,” which focus on companies with actual business operations, not “entities whose primary activities are investment-oriented in nature.”
In November, JPMorgan (NASDAQ: JPM), analysts warned that Strategy could see $11.6 billion in outflows should MSCI vote to banish DATs. TD Cowen analysts suggested the outflow might total $2.5 billion if only MSCI purged DATs, rising to $8 billion if other indices mirrored MSCI’s decision.
Some crypto organizations were sufficiently alarmed by this scenario that they began lobbying Congress to lean on MSCI to preserve DATs’ ability to attract passive investor interest (and expose said investors to crypto-related risks).
Bitcoin for Corporations, a group lobbying to ‘protect index integrity’ by convincing MSCI to back off its delisting plans, claimed MSCI’s proposal would negatively impact 39 companies. It would also “violate core benchmark principles and would impose significant investor harm through forced turnover and tracking error.”
In December, Strategy wrote its own letter to MSCI, calling the proposed 50% threshold for digital assets “discriminatory, arbitrary, and unworkable.” The letter further argued that the proposal “injects policy considerations into indexing … conflicts with U.S. policy and would stifle innovation.”
While all this lobbying was going on, the Polymarket prediction site launched a market on whether MSCI will delist MSTR by March 31, which before MSCI’s Tuesday announcement, had 76% of the market betting on ‘yes.’ Following the announcement, the ‘yes’ vote plunged to 3% (but has since inched up to 6%).
A cynic might suggest that the new year’s rally staged by BTC, Ethereum’s ETH and other prominent tokens was staged to put some wind in the sails of underperforming DATs so MSCI might choose to ignore warning signs like, say, Strategy losing $17.4 billion in three months. If this rally now stops, expect the ranks of these cynics to grow.
Bitmine wants to boost share count 100x
Strategy’s MSCI reprieve notwithstanding, it’s definitely getting harder to convince investors of the wisdom of buying DAT shares at a premium to their underlying assets. More than one-third of the publicly traded BTC treasuries listed on BitcoinTreasuries.net currently sport an mNAV below 1.0. Similar stats can be found by looking at treasuries built around ETH. (The less said about DATs built around more obscure tokens, the better.)
Speaking of ETH, the Peter Thiel-backed ETHZilla Corporation (NASDAQ: ETHZ), sold $74.5 million of its ETH just before Christmas to pay down debt (after previously selling $40 million worth of ETH to fund share buybacks). ETHZilla’s share price peaked at $174.60 last summer but currently sits at just $5.16.
The white whale of ETH-based DATs is BitMine Immersion Technologies (NASDAQ: BMNR), which on January 5 announced that its stack of ETH had grown to 4,143,502, representing 3.43% of the total 120.7 million ETH in circulation. Bitmine also holds 192 BTC and $915 million in cash, pushing the total value of its holdings to over $14 billion.
Like most DATs, Bitmine wants to sell more shares to the public to get money to buy more tokens. But the company recently floated a proposal to increase the number of authorized shares of its common stock 100-fold, from 500 million to 50 billion. Shareholders can vote on the proposal ahead of the company’s annual meeting in Las Vegas on January 15.
Bitmine’s chairman, Tom Lee, posted a video explaining the rationale behind the proposed share increase, such as allowing Bitmine to conduct capital markets activities, along with the flexibility to “pursue opportunistic deals, including potential mergers or acquisitions.” But “most importantly, it would enable the company to implement future stock splits as needed.”
Bitmine’s shares closed Tuesday’s trading down 3% to $32.33, well off its $161.00 peak last July when it first launched its DAT strategy. But Lee says Bitmine’s shares have “closely tracked movement in ETH,” and should ETH’s value soar to, say, $250,000, the price of a single Bitmine share would be ~$5,000.
A share price of $5,000 would be out of reach for most investors, so to keep shares “accessible” to the public, Bitmine would need to split the shares and reset the price back to something less gargantuan.
Some Bitmine shareholders aren’t buying Lee’s arguments, pointing out the negative impact of dilution on shareholders of other DATs (like MSTR). But Lee says Bitmine has no plan to immediately issue 50 billion new shares; it just wants options in case ETH’s price goes ballistic.
For the record, ETH’s price is currently ~$3,250, more than twice the $1,500 it was trading at last April but a far cry from the $5,000 it brushed up against last August.
Bitmine trying to have its cake and ETH it too?
Shortly before Christmas, controversy erupted when an X user posted screenshots of a December 17 research note from Sean Farrell, head of digital asset strategy at Fundstrat Global Advisors, a company founded by Bitmine’s Lee. Farrell claimed BTC’s price would experience a “meaningful drawdown” in H1 2026 to a range between $60,000-$65,000, while ETH would fall to a range of $1,800-$2,000.
Just days later, Lee was telling CNBC that BTC could hit a new all-time high by the end of January 2026 and so “we should not think that the price of Bitcoin, Ethereum, or cryptocurrency has peaked.” While the words ‘could’ and ‘should’ offer wiggle room, the perception that Lee was saying one thing in public while his company was telling investors the opposite didn’t sit well with many X users.
Farrell offered a defense of these differing views, saying his work is “geared toward crypto-heavy portfolios and a more active approach to the market.” Farrell said his base case is “an early-year bounce followed by another 1H drawdown, creating a more attractive opportunity into year-end.” But like Lee, he too expects BTC and ETH to “challenge new [all-time highs] by year-end, effectively ending the traditional four-year cycle with a shorter, shallower bear.”
Not everyone was pacified with this explanation, noting that Lee’s highly bullish (and highly public) takes are far more accessible by average users than the “more measured” takes (Farrell’s words) expressed by analysts in Fundstrat reports.
Bitmine helps clears ETH validator exit queue
While many like to refer to Bitmine as ETH’s Strategy, Bitmine has begun generating actual revenue off its tokens by staking ETH for use in Ethereum’s proof-of-stake (PoS) transaction consensus mechanism. As of January 4, Bitmine had 659,219 ETH staked, 250,592 higher than the week before.
Bitmine plans to roll out its Made in America Validator Network (MAVAN) in “early calendar 2026,” but for now, the company is working with three outside staking providers. Once MAVAN is up and running, Bitmine expects to generate annual staking revenue of $374 million.
In early October, just before the price of ETH began to recede from its all-time highs, the exit queue for Ethereum’s existing validators looking to cash in their tokens contained 2.4 million ETH worth over $10 billion. The average time that ETH stakers spent in the queue was nearly 42 days.
Fast forward to this week, and the queue had been reduced to just 32 ETH with a wait time of one minute. While it’s since nudged back up to ~9,500 ETH and a slightly under four-hour wait, the entry queue wait-time is over 25 days, and there’s over 1.4 million ETH waiting to join. And since Bitmine has so far staked only 16% of its total ETH stack, it’s a safe bet that it’s well-represented in the entry queue.
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