Crypto treasury execs grit their teeth amid Bitcoin price bloodbath

Executives at digital asset treasury companies put on a brave face on Thursday as cryptocurrencies continued their monthslong slide.

That slide has completely erased the industry’s once-remarkable gains in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection in November 2024.

Bitcoin on Thursday fell below $64,000, and Ether fell below $1,900 — month-over-month declines of 31% and 42%, respectively.

The crash is likely to exacerbate woes at so-called digital asset treasuries such as Strategy.

About a year ago, many companies with preexisting business models — and many without — rode the post-election rally by taking on debt to purchase vast amounts of Bitcoin and other leading cryptocurrencies.

Investors saw it as a way to gain indirect exposure to a rising asset class, and many of the companies saw their stock price soar.

But the trade went sideways as crypto prices began to slide toward the end of 2025. Now, many digital asset treasuries have seen their stock price fall below the value of their crypto holdings.

Still, executives at three leading DATs said they would weather the storm.

What‘s the difference?

“When Evernorth goes public, it will do so with revenue of over a billion dollars,” Jessica Jonas, the XRP treasury firm’s chief legal officer, said at the Digital Assets at Duke conference in Durham, North Carolina, on Thursday.

“What we look at, how we measure is year-over-year, not day-over-day. You don’t sell your Apple stock because tech stocks are in a dip.”

Ben Werkman, chief investment officer at Bitcoin treasury firm Strive, said not all DATs were created equal.

And the fact that they accumulated crypto will matter less than how they use that crypto.

“There’s no such thing as a pure play treasury,” he said.

“These are operating companies that have decided to structure their balance sheets around a digital asset. ... But the way [they] are going to use that balance sheet is entirely different.”

Katherine Dowling, the President at Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company, said the firm has yield and “alpha” strategies.

“Those income producing sides of our operating business will pay down the debt,” she said.

But she acknowledged there was “absolutely nothing” to stop an activist investor from forcing a firm whose stock price had fallen below that of its crypto holdings to sell its crypto.

And treasury companies received a wake up call in November when index provider MSCI said it might exclude them from its indexes, according to Jonas.

“The fact that it had to get to that point meant that they weren’t doing a very good job — and none of us were doing a very good job — of communicating, ‘What exactly are these Treasury companies? What are they doing, and why should they be included in indexes?’” she said.

Strive’s Werkman said his business model was based, in part, on two highly optimistic assumptions.

First, every company would eventually hold Bitcoin on its balance sheet; second, Bitcoin would grow at a 30-35% compound annual growth rate over the next decade.

“We’re terrified everyone else is going to figure out what we figured out,” he said, “and by the time everyone else figures it out, it’s going to be very difficult to acquire that capital base.”

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.