How Does a Failed BTC Treasury Company Complete the Delisting Process?

Original | Odaily (@OdailyChina)

Author｜Azuma (@azuma_eth)

From Strategy to Bitmine, over the past two years we have witnessed the rise of far too many crypto treasury companies (DATs) — some accumulated massive amounts of BTC through continuous fundraising, others took a different path by betting heavily on ETH and other altcoin assets, and still others, once unremarkable public companies, transformed themselves through this model into proxies for crypto assets in the public equity markets.

This model was once quite effective. As long as a company's stock could command a premium over its net asset value, it could keep fundraising, keep buying coins, and further boost market attention… But have you ever considered, if one day this game can no longer be played, how exactly should a crypto treasury company exit?

Today, we are witnessing the answer to this question unfold at UK-listed company Satsuma — sell the BTC, shut down operations, return the vast majority of capital to shareholders, and voluntarily delist from the stock market.

With the planned delisting date of September 14 now formally arriving, Satsuma is set to become the first case in the past two years of treasury mania to voluntarily complete the full process of "liquidating BTC → returning capital → final delisting" — while there have been similar cases before, Profusa ultimately retained its listing status under delisting pressure, and DigiAsia chose to delist due to a merger and restructuring, both situations being different from Satsuma's.

How did Satsuma reach this point?

On July 20, 2026, Satsuma held a shareholder meeting to vote on two special resolutions: one to return the vast majority of the company's capital to shareholders, and the other to cancel the company's listing on the FCA Official List.

The outcome was hardly in doubt. The first resolution received 90.63% approval, and the second received 90.59% approval. After shareholder approval, the board immediately began preparing to shut down the company's trading activities and started selling its remaining 669 BTC holdings.

This was not a sudden decision. In fact, Satsuma's BTC treasury strategy had long been in trouble. Since pivoting to the treasury approach, Satsuma had accumulated as much as 1,199 BTC, but its average cost basis exceeded $113,000. As BTC's price declined, the value of the company's BTC assets on its books shrank rapidly, and the valuation given by the capital markets also fell steadily.

In December 2025, Satsuma sold 579 BTC in one go, roughly half of its holdings at the time, in exchange for about £40 million (at a unit price of about £69,084, or roughly $93,057 at current exchange rates). But the purpose of this transaction was not to proactively reduce BTC exposure, but to address liquidity pressure — the company needed to repay a convertible bond of about £78 million maturing that month. But things did not improve afterward. BTC's price continued to decline, and Satsuma's cash flow pressure grew increasingly severe.

At this point in the story, the reverse drawbacks of the BTC treasury model had begun to fully expose themselves in Satsuma — when a company needs to rely on selling BTC to repay debt, the original cycle of "fundraise → buy coins → fundraise again" becomes very difficult to sustain.

The stock price performance was even more dramatic. Measured from its peak in June 2025, by the time of the delisting vote in July this year, Satsuma's stock price had fallen by about 99% cumulatively, and its market capitalization had even at one point dropped below the value of the BTC the company held.

In other words, the market was no longer willing to pay a premium for this BTC treasury company, and so the very meaning of continuing to maintain this listed entity began to be questioned. In April 2026, one of Satsuma's largest institutional shareholders, Pantera Capital, publicly demanded that the company abandon its treasury model, sell its remaining BTC, and return the cash to shareholders. Subsequently, shareholders holding more than 20% of the company's shares jointly requested a shareholder meeting, ultimately driving the capital return and delisting proposals.

In the end, more than 90% of shareholders chose to support the capital return and delisting, and Satsuma thus formally ended its story as a BTC treasury company.

What steps are required for a DAT to voluntarily delist?

The remaining question is how exactly the delisting should be executed, and Satsuma has personally provided the market with a complete demonstration.

The first step is for the shareholder meeting to pass the special resolutions. A company cannot simply shut down a listed entity based on a board decision alone. Satsuma first needed shareholders to vote on whether to approve the capital return and the cancellation of its listing status.

The second step is to determine the shareholders and number of shares ultimately entitled to the capital return. Satsuma chose to carry out the capital return through "B Shares." After the record period ended, the final confirmed number was 11,235,874,700 shares. This is important because how much each share ultimately receives depends mainly on two variables — how many assets the company ultimately has left, and how many shares ultimately participate in the distribution.

The third step is to sell the BTC, shut down operations, and clean up the balance sheet. This is also the most critical step in a DAT's exit process, meaning it will transform from a listed company holding BTC into a liquidation entity waiting to distribute remaining cash. Between July 24 and July 31, Satsuma sold all of the company's remaining 669 BTC, generating total proceeds of about £31.91 million (at a unit price of about £47,667, or roughly $64,226 at current exchange rates).

The fourth step is for the court to confirm the capital return plan. This is also a relatively unique part of the UK company law process. On September 8, the UK High Court approved Satsuma's cancellation of 11,235,874,700 "B Shares" and the return of about £30.72 million to shareholders, so the return amount per "B Share" was determined to be £0.002734.

The fifth and final step is delisting and completing the asset distribution to shareholders. According to the timetable previously announced by Satsuma, the company will complete its delisting on September 14, and eligible shareholders are expected to receive their "refunds" on September 28. Only at this point has a BTC treasury company truly completed its exit in the full sense.

Another test for treasury companies

Satsuma's story certainly cannot be simply understood as a failed sample of the crypto treasury model. After all, leading companies such as Strategy and Bitmine are still continuously expanding their asset scale. But for smaller DATs with limited fundraising capacity, when BTC falls, the stock price drops below net asset value, and even fundraising becomes difficult to continue, "keep accumulating coins" is no longer the only answer.

In a sense, how to buy BTC is only the first half of a treasury company's story; how to exit is the second half it must face. Satsuma's journey this time — from shareholder vote, to liquidating BTC, returning capital, to court approval and final delisting — has also provided latecomers with a fairly complete "exit manual."

As more and more companies pile into the DAT race, the market perhaps ought to start paying attention to another metric: a treasury company must not only have the ability to buy BTC in, but also the ability to safely return assets to shareholders when the rules of the game change.