After facing severe headwinds since late 2025, digital asset government bonds are now showing signs of relief.
According to Zach Pandl, head of research at asset manager Grayscale, the sector has emerged from dire straits thanks to new strategies.
The DATs are once again finding a foothold. They have done this by optimizing capital structures, generating revenues and diversifying business models.
How DATs are dealing with the crypto winter
For example, the market leader in the market segment, Strategy, switched from convertible bonds to preferred shares. And Racks (STRC) emerged as a major capital driver for the Bitcoin buying spree.
Moreover, it launched a $2.25 billion USD reserve. This would help to cover short-term dividend obligations associated with the preferred stock offering.
Collectively, the new and optimized capital structures have helped the company reduce its overall debt burden. By extension, it also helped Strategy avoid being removed from major benchmark indices such as the MSCI index.
On the other hand, some players, such as SharpLink Gaming and BitMine Immersion Technologies, the world’s largest Ethereum treasury company, chose to stake and redeploy their crypto holdings to generate income.
In fact, BitMine is targeting $300 million in annual revenue if it deploys its entire 4.6 million ETH supply in the following weeks.
At the same time, other treasury companies, such as Bitcoin miner MARAsold some of their holdings to bet on AI adoption, as a way to diversify away from the crypto sector to maximize income potential.
Treasury companies are operating under pressure
But not everyone managed to adapt accordingly without burning through their assets. For example, BTC’s treasury company, backed by David Bailey, Nakamoto, saw its shares fall almost to zero. Notably, Sequans sold 970 BTC and paid 50% of its convertible debt, reducing its charge from $189 million to $94.5 million.
In the same way, ETHZilla liquidated a portion of its ETH holdings, worth $114 million, to fund share buybacks, pay down debt and focus on tokenization.
It’s worth pointing out that the value of almost all of the Treasury’s crypto investments has fallen below their enterprise value in recent months, forcing most of them to buy back shares to increase their holdings.
This was done by divesting crypto holdings or taking out additional loans. For example, Metaplanet has one A $500 million loan and pledged to sell his BTC holdings instead.
Overall, fire sales among DATs were limited. In fact, they have been net accumulators in recent weeks.
Final summary
- DATs, led by Strategy, MARA and BitMine, opted for new capital structures, new revenue streams and diversification into other sectors to survive the crypto crisis.
- Grayscale noted that DATs were net buyers in recent weeks, underscoring that they were back to “solid.”