Crypto
Eth treasury firms
(Sherwood Media)

Ethereum treasury firms are having a “bad time” as many fall below the value of their stockpile

Since October, BitMine, ETHZilla, SharpLink Gaming, and several other treasury firms’ stock prices have performed worse than ethereum itself.

Sage D. Young

The overall performance of digital asset treasury firms (DATs) focused on ethereum has been significantly down as shares of these firms are performing worse than their underlying asset in Q4. 

Since October, the price of ethereum has dropped 18% to under $3,500 as of Tuesday morning. 

Shares of BitMine Immersion Technologies and SharpLink Gaming — the two largest ethereum stockpiling companies — have fallen 20.2% and 31.2%, respectively, in the period. ETHZilla has slid 23.5%, BTCS Inc. has slumped 38.7%, and FG Nexus has decreased nearly 46%, data from crypto analytics firm Artemis shows. 

The price action comes as their basic mNAV — a metric that refers to the market capitalization of these firms relative to the value of their crypto asset holdings — is below 1, according to Blockworks Research. 

“An mNAV under one limits the ability for DATs to perform accretive dilution, which is the principle that permits DATs to purchase more underlying assets and fulfill their mandate of increasing the asset value per share,” per Gurnoor Narula, a research analyst at Placeholder VC. 

Narula told Sherwood News, “DATs start showing cracks when they aren’t able to close that mNAV gap, either because they’ve run out of funds to do so, or the underlying asset is distressed such that investor confidence has waned.”

Bitcoin powerhouse Strategy has also suffered, declining 26% since October 1, though its mNAV stands just above 1. 

Optimism remains, but not deploying any more capital

Kenetic, a blockchain venture capital firm that invested $5 million in ETHZilla, is not deploying more funds at this point, the investment firm’s founder and managing partner, Jehan Chu, said to Sherwood. 

However, Chu remains confident in the digital asset treasury model and is “optimistic that when interest rates are lowered and crypto experiences a push, we will see a corresponding surge in DATs including ETHZilla.” 

Chu continued, “DATs provide leverage on the underlying assets. In good times it’s great and in bad times it’s terrible — we’re just passing through a bad time.”

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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