Hong Kong’s SFC has raised concerns about the rise of digital asset treasuries, companies that put crypto on their balance sheet.
Often, the stock price of such firms trades at a premium compared to their treasury reserves, and this seems to be where the SFC’s concern lies. Kelvin Wong Tin-yau, the regulator’s chairman, noted, “The SFC is concerned about whether DAT companies’ share prices are traded at a substantial premium above the cost of their DAT holdings.”
The bourse operator, which names the Hong Kong Government as its largest shareholder, challenged the plans of these companies, raising compliance issues with rules that prohibit large liquid holdings.
Wong revealed that the SFC is closely monitoring DATs and plans to strengthen public awareness about the associated risks. “We caution investors to fully understand the underlying risks of DAT,” said the SFC chairman.
The firm paid about $47.4 billion in total to assemble its BTC treasury, so at the current price of the crypto, it’s sitting at a healthy profit of almost 49%. Strategy’s success has unleashed a DAT wave, as other companies rush to replicate the model.
Bitcoin isn’t the only asset that corporates are looking at today; there has also been a rise in DATs focused on Ethereum and Solana. Bitmine owns the largest ETH treasury in the world, containing about 3.34 million tokens, equivalent to $13 billion. While Forward Industries is the king of SOL DATs with 6,822 coins or $1.3 billion in assets.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $110,000, down around 2.7% over the last 24 hours.
