Digital asset treasury (DAT) companies face a grim future heading into 2026, with shares in many of the largest players sharply down, industry executives say.

“Going into the next year, I think that the outlook for DATs is looking a bit bleak,” Altan Tutar, co-founder and CEO of crypto yield platform MoreMarkets, told Cointelegraph.

Large numbers of crypto treasury companies emerged in 2025 to give Wall Street investors another avenue to access cryptocurrencies. The share prices of many initially shot up as heavyweight investors poured in billions as Bitcoin rose to a peak in October, but a broad crypto market declinehas since hurt their valuations.

With the market increasingly crowded, Tutar predicted the herd will thin out dramatically.

“Most Bitcoin treasury companies will disappear with the rest of the DATs,” he predicted.

Tutar said crypto treasuries focused on altcoins “will be the first to go” as they won’t be able to sustain their company’s market value above the value of their crypto holdings, a key metric to investors called mNAV.

“I suspect that the flagship DATs for large assets like Ethereum, Solana, and XRP will follow that way pretty quickly too,” he said.

However, Tutar said the crypto-buying companies most likely to win are those providing additional value besides their large stash, such as offering products that “provide strong, consistent returns on their holdings, and pass them on to stakeholders.”

Yield strategies needed to survive downturn

Ryan Chow, the co-founder of the Bitcoin platform Solv Protocol, told Cointelegraph that the number of companies buying and holding Bitcoin grew from 70 at the start of 2025 to over 130 by the middle of the year.

Chow said that a Bitcoin treasury “isn’t a one-stop solution to infinite dollar growth” and also tipped that many are “unlikely to survive the next downturn.”

“Those that do will be the ones that treat their Bitcoin holdings as part of a broader yield strategy rather than a temporary hold of value,” he added.

Chow said the crypto treasury companies that saw the biggest wins in 2025 were those that used “on-chain instruments to generate sustainable yield, or collateralized assets for access to liquidity during market drawdowns.”

The types of crypto treasuries that fared worse, and which have had to sell their crypto to cover business costs, are those that “treated accumulation as a marketing narrative without a proper treasury framework to support it,” he added.

“The model needs to evolve from speculative to structured financial management,” Chow said. “Treasury holders need to go beyond just holding Bitcoin and think about actively managing it as digital capital within a transparent, yield-generating system.”

Vincent Chok, the CEO of stablecoin issuer First Digital, told Cointelegraph that Bitcoin treasury companies that are successful “have conscientious allocation strategies, operational liquidity, and treat Bitcoin as only one component of their financial plan.”

Treasuries should link with TradFi to compete with ETFs

Chok said that investors are turning to crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) instead as an easy way to get “regulated price exposure” to digital assets.

ETFs have become a major competitor for crypto treasury companies, as asset managers have launched products that include staking returns after US regulators relaxed its rules for offering yields.

Chok said the crypto treasury model needs to evolve to “match traditional finance expectations” for transparency, auditability, and compliance — much like ETFs.

“The model needs to integrate with professional traditional finance infrastructure to ensure operations are compliant with institutional standards for token screening and asset management,” he added.