Crypto: Why Digital Asset Treasuries That Only Hodl May Fall Short 2026

Passive crypto hoarding exposes DATs to compliance risks while missing opportunities to provide patient capital. DAT 2.0 invests in infrastructure supporting ecosystem longevity.

Opinion by: Mike Maloney, Chairman of 21 Vault, a company operating in digital asset infrastructure and treasury strategy

​Digital asset treasuries (DATs) started back in 2020 with Strategy’s decision to buy and hold Bitcoin (BTC). ​That fateful decision has created a treasury with a market capitalization exceeding $80 billion.

​A flurry of companies began to replicate this buy-and-hold approach. These new DATs raise huge amounts of capital to buy their chosen asset before merging with publicly traded companies, giving investors exposure to crypto via their stocks.

Summer turned to winter. In certain market conditions, a pure buy-and-hold approach can fall short of shareholder expectations; worse, these efforts miss a major opportunity for DATs to serve as the core source of patient capital that crypto desperately needs.

The success of Strategy’s Bitcoin accumulation model spurred the launch of a growing number of DATs, but they failed to adopt Saylor’s capital market strategy and simply held on to them. This is the wrong approach, placing the balance sheet at FX and management risks, rather than building a strategy to generate a return on investment (ROI) for shareholders.

DATs should not bet their futures on one assumption: that Bitcoin and other crypto prices will always go up. That’s not treasury management; that’s leveraged speculation. It leaves these companies vulnerable to both market drawdowns and regulatory classification as investment companies, potentially raising compliance and classification risks in some jurisdictions.

Meanwhile, their crypto holdings sit idle, doing nothing to enhance liquidity, stability or adoption in the broader ecosystem. None of these DATs are deploying capital back into the ecosystem or technologies that sustain their assets. They’re not supporting Bitcoin’s financial infrastructure, improving Lightning liquidity or funding development that strengthens the network.

There’s no value in corporate hodling for its own sake. Individuals can do that. A company must have a strategy, and that strategy should serve both its investors and the community it depends on.

We can’t bet on crypto prices increasing, but we can bet on crypto being adopted in new and emerging economies. An effective DAT strategy involves leveraging crypto into strategie

Source: CoinTelegraph