"Unlimited ammunition" is just an illusion; Crypto Vault is losing its ability to buy at rock-bottom prices.

During the brief rally that began in April, crypto treasury companies acted as major buyers, providing a steady stream of liquidity. However, when the crypto market and stock prices both plummeted, these crypto treasury companies seemed to collectively go silent.

When prices reach a temporary bottom, it should be the perfect time for these financial institutions to buy at the bottom. However, in reality, buying activity has slowed down or even stopped. This collective silence is not simply due to depletion of "ammunition" at the peak or panic, but rather a systemic paralysis of the financing mechanism, which heavily relies on premiums, resulting in a "money available but unusable" situation during a downturn.

Hundreds of billions of "ammunition" locked up

To understand why these DAT companies are facing the dilemma of "having money but not being able to use it," we need to conduct an in-depth analysis of the sources of funding for crypto treasury companies.

Take Strategy, the leading cryptocurrency treasury company, as an example. Its funding has primarily come from two sources: one is "convertible notes," which involves issuing bonds at extremely low interest rates to borrow money to buy cryptocurrencies. The other is the At-The-Market (ATM) mechanism, where the company can issue new shares to raise funds to increase its Bitcoin holdings when its share price has a premium relative to the crypto assets it holds.

Prior to 2025, Strategy's primary source of funding was convertible notes. As of February 2025, Strategy had raised $8.2 billion through convertible notes to purchase more Bitcoin. Starting in 2024, Strategy began large-scale adoption of at-the-market (ATM) equity offerings. This method is more flexible, allowing the issuance of new shares at market price to purchase crypto assets when the share price exceeds the market capitalization of the crypto assets held. In the third quarter of 2024, Strategy announced a $21 billion ATM equity offering, followed by a second $21 billion ATM offering in May 2025. As of now, the total remaining amount under this plan is $30.2 billion.

However, these quotas are not cash, but rather quotas of Class A preferred and common stock available for sale. For Strategy to convert these quotas into cash, it needs to sell these shares on the market. When the stock price is at a premium (for example, at $200, each share contains $100 worth of Bitcoin), selling the shares is equivalent to converting newly issued shares into $200 in cash, and then buying $200 worth of Bitcoin, thus increasing the Bitcoin content per share—this is the flywheel logic behind Strategy's previous unlimited ammunition. However, when Strategy's mNAV (mNAV = circulating market capitalization / Bitcoin holding value) falls below 1, the situation reverses; selling shares becomes a discount. After November, Strategy's mNAV remained below 1 for an extended period. Therefore, during this time, although Strategy had a large number of shares available for sale, it was unable to purchase Bitcoin.

Furthermore, Strategy not only failed to withdraw funds to buy at the bottom recently, but also chose to raise $1.44 billion by selling shares at a discount to establish a dividend reserve pool to support preferred stock dividend payments and interest payments on existing debt.

As a standard template for crypto treasuries, Strategy's mechanism has been adopted by most treasury companies. Therefore, we see that when crypto assets fall, the reason these treasury companies fail to buy at the bottom is not simply unwillingness, but rather because the stock price has fallen too much, locking up their "ammunition depot."

Nominally possessing ample firepower, but in reality "having guns but no ammunition".

So, besides Strategy, how much purchasing power do other companies have? After all, there are already hundreds of crypto treasury companies in this market.

From the current market perspective, although there are numerous crypto treasury companies, their potential for further purchases is not significant. There are two main scenarios: one is where the company's core business is already a crypto asset holder, and its crypto asset holdings primarily come from its existing holdings rather than new purchases through bond issuance. Therefore, its ability and motivation to raise funds through bond issuance are not strong. For example, Cantor Equity Partners (CEP) ranks third in Bitcoin holdings with an mNAV of 1.28. Its Bitcoin holdings mainly originated from its merger with Twenty One Capital, and it has not made any purchases since July.

Another type of company employs a similar strategy, but due to the recent sharp decline in stock prices, their average mNAV value has generally fallen below 1. The ATM limits for these companies are also locked, and the flywheel can only be turned on again if the stock price rises above 1.

Beyond issuing bonds and selling stocks, there is another direct "ammunition depot": cash reserves. Take BitMine, the largest Ethereum DAT company, as an example. Although its mNAV is also below 1, the company has maintained its buying plan recently. According to data from December 1st, BitMine stated that it still has $882 million in uncollateralized cash on hand. BitMine Chairman Tom Lee recently stated, "We believe the price of Ethereum has bottomed out, and BitMine has resumed its accumulation, purchasing nearly 100,000 ETH last week, double the amount from the previous two weeks." BitMine's ATM limits are equally impressive; in July 2025, the total limit was increased to $24.5 billion, and it currently still has close to $20 billion in limits.

BitMine Holdings Changes

In addition, CleanSpark announced at the end of November that it would issue $1.15 billion in convertible bonds within the year to purchase Bitcoin. Metaplanet, a Japanese listed company, is another active Bitcoin treasury firm, having raised over $400 million since November through Bitcoin-backed loans or stock issuances to purchase Bitcoin.

In terms of total volume, companies have hundreds of billions of dollars in "nominal ammunition" (cash + ATM credit) on their books, far exceeding the previous bull market. However, in terms of "effective firepower," the actual number of bullets that can be fired has decreased.

From "leveraged expansion" to "survival of the fittest"

Besides having their ammunition locked up, these crypto treasury companies are also exploring new investment strategies. During market rallies, most companies employed a simple strategy: buy indiscriminately, raise more funds as crypto stocks rose, and then continue buying. However, as the situation has shifted, many companies are not only facing greater difficulty in raising funds but also the challenge of paying interest on previously issued bonds and managing operating costs.

Therefore, many companies have begun to turn their attention to "crypto yields," which are relatively stable staking returns obtained by participating in online staking activities for crypto assets, and using these returns to pay the interest and operating costs required for financing.

BitMine plans to launch MAVAN (a US-based validator network) in the first quarter of 2026 to enable ETH staking. This is expected to generate $340 million in annualized returns for BitMine. Similar companies like Upexi and Sol Strategies, which operate on the Solana network, offer annualized returns of approximately 8%.

It is foreseeable that as long as mNAV cannot return to above 1.0, accumulating cash to cope with debt maturities will become the main theme for treasury companies. This trend also directly affects asset selection. Due to the lack of inherently high yields in Bitcoin, the accumulation of pure Bitcoin treasuries is slowing down, while Ethereum, which can generate cash flow through staking to cover interest costs, has maintained a resilient pace of treasury accumulation.

This shift in asset preferences is essentially a compromise by treasury companies to address their liquidity difficulties. When the channel for obtaining cheap funds through stock price premiums is closed, finding interest-bearing assets becomes their only lifeline to maintain a healthy balance sheet.

Ultimately, the "unlimited ammunition" is nothing more than a pro-cyclical illusion built on stock price premiums. When the flywheel locks in due to discounts, the market must face a stark reality: these financial companies have always been amplifiers of trends, not saviors against them. Only when the market recovers first can the valves of capital be reopened.