NYDIG’s latest weekly digest, published September 5, 2025 and authored by Global Head of Research Greg Cipolaro, argues that the premium investors once paid for “Digital Asset Treasury” (DAT) companies has been deflating even as bitcoin printed a fresh all-time high in mid-August.
DATs are public companies whose core strategy is to hold bitcoin on the balance sheet; the premium (or discount) reflects the gap between a firm’s share price and its underlying net asset value (NAV) per bitcoin share. NYDIG’s takeaway: the once-frothy premium has compressed across the group, and that compression itself is emerging as a macro-signal for Bitcoin’s cycle rather than a company-specific quirk.
The supply calendar is front and center. NYDIG cautions that “for many DATs, conditions may deteriorate before they improve,” because numerous BTC-focused treasuries still need to complete mergers or finalize equity and debt financings to register shares for unrestricted trading. In many cases, “over 95% of the new outstanding shares are tied to these transactions,” implying a potential wave of secondary supply once registrations go effective. If prices into those unlocks weaken, the selling pressure could feed on itself.
If premiums keep compressing and discounts open up, the most direct remedy NYDIG highlights is corporate buybacks. Yet, among major bitcoin-treasury names, buyback authorizations are largely absent. Empery Digital is the exception, trading at a roughly 24% discount to NAV with a program in place. By contrast, Nakamoto is leaning into equity issuance via a $5 billion at-the-market offering—an approach that, by definition, tends to lean on the premium rather than defend it. NYDIG’s counsel is blunt: keep some cash back “to support shares via buybacks.”
Beyond near-term market mechanics, NYDIG sketches what a next phase of maturation could look like: accretive M&A and even shareholder activism among DATs. Because accretion is a function of relative premium, an acquirer trading at a higher NAV premium than a target can increase its bitcoin-per-share count through a stock deal even if the target is not at a discount. If this logic takes hold, the consolidators will likely be firms that can sustain higher premiums and operate at sufficient scale to execute meaningful transactions.
The research house stops short of making a hard-timing call. But the contours are clear: a once-buoyant premium regime for bitcoin treasuries is being wrung out by supply, issuance, and strategy convergence; management teams may need to pivot from opportunistic equity taps to defensive buybacks; and if history rhymes, the trajectory of MicroStrategy’s premium—peaking months ahead of bitcoin’s ultimate highs—may again be whispering where we are in the cycle. As NYDIG frames it, the “signal” embedded in DAT premiums is getting louder, even if the dataset is young.
At press time, bitcoin traded at $111,373.
