The hangover from the paper bitcoin summer delusion has arrived, swiftly and painfully. We see it, not in the bitcoin price, which is once more calmly and unremarkably ticking upward — pushing up against $117,000 Tuesday evening — but in the stock prices of bitcoin treasury companies. They’re all getting slaughtered: Look at the graphs of $MSTR, Metaplanet, $NAKA, H100, Smarter Web Company and they all look the same — shitcoin-style pump into the heavens, followed by a drawn-out decline back to where they started (or well below it).
For a while there, we — and the rest of Wall Street — thought anyone could arbitrage financial markets. Issue shares at above their intrinsic value; buy bitcoin; repeat. For this vertiginous summer fling, Wall Street was paying more than a dollar for a dollar’s worth of bitcoin, and everyone’s eyes lit up with dollar signs; this is a trade that, if you’re able to, you’ll happily do all day long.
But now that that’s over, there’ll be hell to pay — and the devil is already out kicking ass and taking names.
Oh, and it’s not nice to kick a guy who’s already down (and certainly not when that guy is in some sense your boss…) but given that $NAKA fell a whopping 50% the other day after the S3 PIPE shares restriction period ended — having already collapsed some 87% from its May pump-and-dump peak — it’d be remiss of us price therapists not to take a second look.
So, with the outstanding, tradeable float of shares increased overnight some 50x — and, one would suppose, plenty of second-layer PIPE “insiders” wanna dump-dump-duuuuump — the formula was pretty simple: lots of extra supply meet no demand equals collapsing price. In bitcoin treasury company analyst Adam Livingston’s words: “And you get a perfect physics lesson here: add mass, you lose altitude.”
As usual, bitcoin didn’t care: It jumped almost 2% today, on no material news, after a brief fling downward off its current $116,000 stablecoin pattern. As Bitcoin Magazine Pro’s Matt Crosby says in a recent video, bitcoin price is “poised for breakout.”
The same cannot be said for the poor treasury companies.
Even best-in-class Saylor’s Strategy ($MSTR) is struggling — as it has since operation offload-on-retail began last year; Strategy is gobbling up coins by the hundreds, yet the mNAV compresses more and more, hitting an (unadjusted) yearly low of 1.27. We’re quickly getting to the point where the stock premium (i.e., the source of all treasury company magic) is gone, and the treasury companies become expensive, glorified ETFs.
“Always have been,” the meme world might retort.
Back to our beloved frog, Nakamoto. Baaaaaad things happened to it recently. This is a nasty chart:
Printing infinite number of copiable paper against a non-credible bitcoin strategy could never have ended any other way. Congrats, NAKA leadership; you wasted six months (or more) of prime bull market real estate playing high finance, and now you’re punished for it.
The delusion that was bitcoin treasury strategy has ended, and the NAKA strategy — running the mNAV-squared treasury strategy — has squarely suffered because of it. (Though, as of this writing, $NAKA is up 20% on the day from its extreme crazy low… yah-yah, nobody cares.)
Livingston is, again, making beautiful sense of the madness:
“The September 15 crash was not a mysterious market mood swing. It was the predictable result of half a billion discounting shares stampeding through an order book designed for a few million: supply floods, the price sinks, and the physics lesson is complete.”
The everlasting upward magic of (money-share printing) bitcoin treasury companies is gone. Good riddance. Now these companies have to prove real value-add with the corporate-wrapped coins they hold on to so dearly… or perhaps we can go back to de-financializing the economy — you know, that annoying, original reason for Bitcoin.
