Crypto asset prices retraced this week, but the spot market is faring better than most digital asset treasury companies, which have lost over 90% of their value in some cases due to market saturation and investor concerns over the sustainability of the digital asset treasury business model.

Strategy, the largest Bitcoin (BTC) treasury company, is down about 45% from its all-time high of $543 per share during intraday trading in November. Comparatively, BTC is up about 10% since hitting a high of over $99,000 over the same month.

Additionally, BTC has printed successive new highs since December, hitting an all-time high of over $123,000 in August, whereas Strategy has failed to reach a new all-time high in 2024 or even recapture its previous all-time high during the same time period.

BTC treasury company Metaplanet tells a similar story; shares of Metaplanet have declined by about 78% since the all-time high of $16 in May.

Metaplanet shares are swapping hands at about $3.55 at the time of this writing. Bitcoin’s price has declined by about 2% since May’s high of over $111,000.

Analysts from global bank Standard Chartered said that the collapse in the multiple on net asset value (mNAV), a metric tracking the enterprise value of a company in relation to its underlying assets, is contracting due to the increase in crypto treasury companies.

“We see market saturation as the main driver of recent mNAV compression,” Standard Chartered analysts wrote. There are currently 140 public companies that have adopted a crypto treasury strategy, according to CoinGecko.

Investors and traders took positions in crypto treasury plays, hoping that the treasury companies would outperform their underlying crypto assets. 

However, the negative price performance of these companies in 2025 has created fear that they may exacerbate the next crypto market downturn through forced selling to meet debt obligations.