How Digital Asset Treasury Companies Stole The Crypto Summer Spotlight

Every year, there is a song of the summer. While songs including Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” and “Manchild” by Sabrina Carpenter grappled for this summer’s coveted song title, an unexpected winner took the crypto summer crown. For the crypto industry, 2025 will forever be known as the summer of Digital Asset Treasury companies, or “DATs.” According to Galaxy Research, DATs are “firms that explicitly pursue a strategy of accumulating digital assets as a core function of their business.” This summer, the DAT revolution took the global financial markets by storm, positioning itself at the convergence of decentralized and traditional finance.

The innovation started with Michael Saylor. In 2020, he abruptly pivoted course with Microstrategy, the business intelligence company he founded, to focus on acquiring bitcoin. The first DAT was born. Today, a rebranded Strategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) saw its stock price surge 22x since September of 2025, while the digital asset it accumulates, bitcoin, appreciated nearly 10x over the same period. As a DAT, Strategy is now viewed by some investors as a levered exposure to bitcoin.

Despite Saylor’s success, few companies dared to replicate the model with other crypto assets under the Biden Administration. In that era, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler alleged that most crypto assets beyond bitcoin were securities, stopping new DATs in their tracks. Under the Investment Company Act of 1940, a company is deemed an “investment company”⸺and must register with the SEC⸺if more than 40% of its total assets are “investment securities.” Potential DATs knew that drawing the ire of a hostile, anti-crypto regulator was an obvious road to failure.

Everything changed with the 2024 Presidential election as President Trump vowed to make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet.” Pro-crypto SEC Chairman Paul Atkins immediately reversed course, ending the “regulation by enforcement” approach of his predecessor. In a July speech, Atkins announced “Project Crypto,” an SEC-wide initiative to support crypto innovation, clarified that most crypto assets are not securities, and committed to bringing crypto asset distributions back to America. The DAT floodgates opened. According to Architect Partners, as of the end of August,184 publicly traded companies have announced intentions to raise $132B+ to acquire crypto assets.

DATs have both equity and crypto qualities. They are often public companies, and their shares trade just like any other public equity. So, retail and institutional investors can buy and sell shares out of their brokerage account, just like any other stock.

The benefit of being a public equity is real. Buying native crypto tokens is challenging. For some investors, crypto may fall outside of their investment mandate. Others may lack the infrastructure and expertise to custody, secure, and trade native crypto assets. DATs solve these issues by wrapping crypto assets under a public equity wrapper. As traditional securities, there is no regulatory ambiguity. These are SEC-regulated securities subject to the public reporting, disclosures and various consumer protections required of all other public equity securities.

The DAT Playbook: Issuing Shares to Buy Crypto

DATs issue and sell public shares and other security types, and use proceeds to buy their designed crypto assets. In doing so, they attempt to drive a premium or positive multiple to net asset value (mNAV) and increase their crypto per share. When the stock price is greater than the NAV of the underlying crypto asset (mNAV > 1), selling equity to buy the underlying crypto asset is generally accretive to shareholders. This was the playbook pioneered by Michael Saylor.

This new class of DATs can drive a premium in an additional way. While bitcoin itself does not have a native yield, other tokens may offer organic yield through the practice of staking. For example, the staking rate benchmark for ether, the native token of the Ethereum blockchain, stands at around 3%. Sophisticated management teams can use both centralized and decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions to drive yields even higher. If management teams control operating expenses, there is a strong case for mNAVs to stay elevated.

Of course, yield generation is never without risk. A myriad of counterparty, operational, and even cyber risks remain. And this is not the only risk. While DATs hope that their equity attracts a premium to the underlying crypto asset (mNAV >1), this is not always the case. In fact, as the summer of 2025 comes to an end, many of the top DATs find themselves trading at a discount to NAV. Trading at a protracted discount leaves companies susceptible to takeovers, especially if the underlying assets are worth more than the value of the equity. Finally, the fundamentals of the underlying treasury asset matter. If investors see DATs as levered exposure to the underlying asset, a poorly performing token could bode poorly for its DAT.

Other Contenders for Crypto Summer

Competition for the crypto summer champion was intense. With its passing in July, the GENIUS Act took the industry by storm, and “stablecoin” summer seemed like the obvious victor. Others, noting the explosive growth and technological breakthroughs of the decentralized artificial intelligence (DeAI) sector, expected it to claim the crypto summer title. Tokenization, the process of wrapping a traditional asset in token form (in some ways a reverse DAT), saw explosive growth as well.

But in the end, it was the DAT innovation that stole the crypto summer spotlight. So, 2025 will always be “DAT summer to remember.”