By mid‑2025, dozens of small to mid‑cap “Bitcoin treasuries” had emerged, some genuine, others opportunistic, pitching themselves as pure‑play proxies for Bitcoin’s upside.
As Bitcoin corrected 13% in October, the effect on these treasuries was magnified. The stocks didn’t just track Bitcoin lower. They cratered, wiping out paper wealth at more than double the rate of the underlying asset’s decline. Strategy fell nearly 35% from its recent peak, while Metaplanet plunged over 50%, erasing the majority of its speculative summer gains.
For late‑entry retail holders, the drawdown wasn’t just painful; it was devastating. 10X Research estimates that since August, retail portfolios focused on digital asset treasury equities have collectively lost around $17 billion. This was concentrated largely among unhedged individual investors in the U.S., Japan, and Europe.
There is irony here: Bitcoin was designed as a self‑sovereign asset, outside the gatekeeping of financial intermediaries. Yet, as it became institutionalized, retail investors found themselves back in familiar territory, buying someone else’s version of Bitcoin through public equities.
These proxies came wrapped in glossy narratives of “corporate conviction,” complete with charismatic CEOs and open‑source branding. In practice, they turned out to be leveraged plays on Bitcoin using corporate balance sheets; a risky bet in a tightening liquidity environment.
When macro headwinds from Washington and Beijing triggered the latest wave of deleveraging, these proxy trades unwound with surgical precision. They hit the same investors who believed they’d found a smarter way to HODL.
There’s little solace in the numbers. But for anyone watching Bitcoin’s cyclical dance between innovation and euphoria, the lesson stands. The closer crypto edges to traditional markets, the more it inherits their distortions. Owning an idea through a company that monetizes belief might be convenient, even exciting, but convenience has a cost.
As 10X Research put it bluntly, equity wrappers for digital assets are not substitutes for the assets themselves. In this chapter of the Bitcoin story, that difference has already cost retail investors 17 billion reasons to remember why decentralization was so appealing in the first place.
