In brief
- Hougan says DATs face structural drag that usually drives them to trade at discounts.
- Only a few uncertain strategies can raise crypto-per-share over time, he argues.
- Other observers now claim staking and spot ETFs are eclipsing the DAT model.
Bitwise’s chief investment officer, Matt Hougan, said Sunday most digital asset treasury (DAT) companies are unlikely to sustain premiums over their underlying crypto holdings, arguing that operational costs, liquidity constraints, and execution risk outweigh the limited ways firms can reliably grow their crypto-per-share.
Hougan laid out a model that begins by treating a DAT as finite, weighing the predictable forces that pull its price below its holdings against the few, often uncertain ways it can raise crypto-per-share.
“Most will trade at a discount, and only a few exceptional firms will trade at a premium,” Hougan tweeted, explaining why DATs will “have a high hurdle.”
Most of the downward pressures on DAT valuations could stem from “illiquidity, expenses, and risk,” factors he described as “certain” across the sector
Hougan broke the discount side of the equation into three parts, starting with “illiquidity,” which he illustrated by asking why anyone would “pay full price today for bitcoin you’d receive in a year.”
To Hougan, the gap between immediate ownership and delayed delivery creates an automatic markdown that widens as the holding period or perceived friction increases.
He then pointed to “expenses” and “risk” as additional sources of drag, noting that “every dollar spent on operating expenses or executive compensation comes out of your pocket,” and that investors must price in the chance that a company “will slip up in some way.”
Put together, those factors form the baseline discount investors assign to a DAT, before considering whether any upside levers can offset it.
Hougan said only a narrow set of strategies can counterbalance that structural drag, pointing to the “four primary ways” DATs try to increase their crypto-per-share.
Those include issuing debt, lending tokens, using options, and buying assets at a discount, steps he said only work in the right conditions and only if executed without adding new risks.
Hougan added that “expenses and risk compound over time,” meaning the drag on a perpetual DAT only grows while any crypto-per-share gains must be repeated across cycles.
Sentiment shift
Hougan’s commentary comes as broader sentiment around DATs continues to turn, with market commentators arguing that regulated exchange-traded funds could deliver cleaner exposure with fewer moving parts.
On Saturday, citing a prior Decrypt piece on staking ETFs, Nate Geraci, co-founder of The ETF Institute, called spot crypto ETFs “DAT killers” that have ended the period when treasuries thrived “via regulatory arbitrage.”
Responding to Geraci by Sunday evening, Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas argued that ETFs effectively serve the same function as DATs but “with good tracking,” meaning they mirror underlying asset performance more cleanly.
Balchunas added that while some institutions can only hold stocks or bonds, which gives structures like MicroStrategy a remaining use case, that audience is “not enough for a bunch of them to thrive,” in his view.
Decrypt reached out to Hougan with further questions, but did not immediately receive a response.
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