Crypto Treasury mNAV Explained: How to Read the Premium on Bitcoin Treasury Stocks

• mNAV, short for multiple of net asset value, compares what the market pays for a crypto treasury company with what its crypto is worth. A reading of 1.0x means the shares are priced exactly at the value of the coins, above 1.0x is a premium and below 1.0x is a discount.
• Basic, diluted, enterprise value and per-share “net” versions all circulate, and on 21 August 2026 one Strategy filing supported readings of 0.77x, 1.00x and 1.01x from the same inputs.
• The premium matters because it decides whether issuing new shares adds or subtracts crypto per share. Above 1.0x, selling stock to buy coins is accretive. Below 1.0x, the same move dilutes holders, and buybacks or coin sales become the logical tools.
• Strategy approved bitcoin sales, Metaplanet bought back about 7% of its shares, UK-listed Satsuma Technology was liquidated by its own shareholders, and MSCI finalised a rule that can remove “non-operating companies” from its indexes from 30 November 2026.

What mNAV measures

mNAV measures how many dollars investors pay for each dollar of crypto held by a listed company whose main business is holding that crypto. Those companies are usually called digital asset treasury companies, or DATs. A DAT raises money through shares, convertible bonds or preferred stock and uses it to buy a reserve asset such as bitcoin, ether or SOL, so the stock becomes a wrapper around a pile of coins.

Net asset value, or NAV, is the market value of that pile. If a company holds 10,000 BTC and bitcoin trades at $100,000, its bitcoin NAV is $1 billion. mNAV then divides a market value for the company by that NAV. The bitcoin treasury data site BitcoinTreasuries.net gives a simple version: a company with 10,000 BTC worth $1.2 billion and a market capitalisation of $1.5 billion has an mNAV of 1.25.

The ratio reads in three bands. Above 1.0x, investors are paying a premium for the coins, usually because they expect management to keep growing crypto per share or because the stock offers access that some investors cannot get directly. At exactly 1.0x, the stock is priced like the coins. Below 1.0x, the market values the company at less than its own treasury, which tells management that the market doubts the strategy, distrusts the balance sheet, or both.

Buy bitcoin and stocks. Signup to Coinbase today

Treasury companies are a large enough group for this to matter. Banking group AMINA counted nearly 200 public companies holding more than $110 billion in digital assets as of January 2026, and the biggest of them now publish their own mNAV figures on investor dashboards.

The four ways to calculate mNAV

The simple definition hides a measurement problem, because “market value of the company” and “value of the crypto” can each be measured in several ways. Four versions dominate trackers, research notes and company dashboards.

Each line answers a different question. Basic mNAV asks how the stock compares with the coins. Enterprise mNAV asks how the entire company, including its creditors and preferred holders, compares with the coins. The net version asks how much of the treasury is left over for common shareholders once senior claims are deducted, and then compares the share price with that residue.

The differences are large for a company with heavy leverage. When a firm has borrowed against its treasury or sold preferred stock to fund purchases, basic mNAV can sit well below 1.0x while enterprise mNAV sits near 1.0x, because the extra claims are added to the numerator in one method and ignored in the other.

One company, three answers: Strategy on 21 August 2026

A single filing from Strategy, the largest corporate bitcoin holder, shows how far apart the methods can land. Its investor briefing filed with the SEC used market data from the 21 August 2026 close and balance sheet data from 23 August 2026.

Plugging those inputs into the formulas gives three readings. Basic mNAV is $49.60 billion divided by $64.718 billion, or 0.77x, a 23% discount. Enterprise mNAV adds debt and preferred and subtracts cash, giving $64.63 billion against $64.718 billion, or 1.00x. Strategy’s own method divides the $119.25 share price by $118.31 of net bitcoin per share, giving 1.008x, which the company reported as 1.01x.

The share price, the bitcoin price and the coin count were identical, and only the definition changed. A UK analysis of the same filing also found a public tracker reporting 0.74x four days later because it was using a share count roughly 8% out of date. Anyone quoting a single mNAV figure for a leveraged treasury company should therefore say which formula and which share count sit behind it.

The future of finance is here. Trade crypto and more

Strategy’s move

Strategy flagged the break itself. Its glossary states that before 23 July 2026 the company used the term mNAV for a different metric, so figures calculated before and after that date cannot be compared. Strategy also warns that Net BPS, its per-share building block, excludes liabilities such as deferred tax, operating leases and legal contingencies, and that it does not represent what common holders would receive in a liquidation.

Why the premium drives the business model

The reason treasury companies care so much about mNAV is that it decides what happens when they sell new shares. A company trading above 1.0x can issue stock, buy crypto with the proceeds, and finish with more crypto per share than before. A company trading below 1.0x that does the same thing ends up with less.

A concrete example

Take a company with 10,000 BTC, 100 million shares and a bitcoin price of $100,000, so NAV is $10 per share. The table shows what happens when it sells 10 million new shares at three different mNAV levels.

This is the mechanism investors call the flywheel. At 2.0x, each new share brings in twice the bitcoin it gives away, so existing holders gain exposure. At 0.8x, the company gives away more bitcoin per share than it brings in. Strategy has formalised that boundary: in its 29 June 2026 framework it committed to stop issuing common shares to buy bitcoin unless the stock trades at a premium to its holdings. BitMine, the largest ether treasury company, has made the same promise in its own releases, stating that it only issues equity at a premium to mNAV.

The same logic runs in reverse when the discount opens. If the company in the example trades at 0.8x and sells 800 BTC to buy back 10 million shares at $8, it ends with 9,200 BTC across 90 million shares, which is 2.2% more bitcoin per share than before the buyback. Below 1.0x, shrinking the share count is the accretive move, which explains why so many 2026 headlines involved buybacks and coin sales.

What treasury companies do when mNAV falls below 1.0x

The shift from premium to discount arrived quickly. Strategy’s basic mNAV reached a peak of roughly 3.4x to 3.9x in November 2024, depending on the tracker, and first slipped below 1.0x in November 2025. By 26 June 2026 it had fallen to 0.58x on SaylorTracker data, and CoinDesk reported on 27 June that even Strategy’s enterprise mNAV had dropped below 1.0x, with enterprise value of about $50.4 billion against bitcoin worth about $51.1 billion at $60,000.

The five broad tools

Companies have answered the discount with five broad tools, and most of the large names have used more than one.

• Building a cash reserve. Strategy’s USD Reserve stood at $2.55 billion on 28 June 2026, enough for about 17.4 months of preferred dividends and interest, and had grown to $4.79 billion by 1 November 2026.
• Selling the reserve asset. Strategy’s board authorised a BTC Monetization Program allowing sales of up to $1.25 billion of bitcoin to fund the reserve, plus further sales to pay dividends and fund buybacks. The company states that the program creates no obligation to sell.
• Buying back stock. Strategy authorised $1.0 billion of common repurchases and $1.0 billion for its preferred “Digital Credit” securities. In Japan, Metaplanet’s board approved a repurchase of up to 200 million shares on 13 October 2026, and the company bought 96.45 million shares for ¥25.27 billion between 14 and 31 October, about 7.1% of issued shares.
• Proving liquidity to lenders. Metaplanet sold 10,000 BTC for ¥124.7 billion during the third quarter and then bought 11,000 BTC for ¥149.9 billion, ending September with 44,000 BTC. The company described the round trip as a demonstration that the treasury can be converted into cash, an argument aimed at rating agencies and bond investors.
• Winding up. UK-listed Satsuma Technology shows the end point. Shareholders holding more than 20% of the company requisitioned a vote, and in July 2026 more than 90% of votes cast approved selling the bitcoin, returning the cash and cancelling the London listing, against the advice of four of the six directors. The company sold 669.49 BTC in late July and the High Court approved a return of about £30.7 million on 8 September 2026, against £163.6 million raised in convertible notes in 2025.

The Satsuma case

The Satsuma case explains why a deep discount invites activism. When a company is worth less than its coins, an investor who forces a sale can capture the gap between the share price and the coin value, as long as costs and senior claims do not eat it first. That threat puts a soft floor under mNAV for companies with simple balance sheets, while companies with large debt and preferred stacks have a much less obvious floor, because creditors are paid before common holders.

Buy bitcoin and stocks. Signup to Coinbase today

Where the leading treasury stocks stand in November 2026

The discount has narrowed for some names since the June low, although the reading still depends heavily on the method. These figures come from company filings and third-party trackers in the first week of November 2026.

Two patterns run through that table. The first is that the gap between methods is widest for Strategy, which has the most debt and preferred stock, so the choice of formula changes the answer from a discount to a 31% premium. The second is that tracker data goes stale quickly. On the same weekend, mNAV.com still listed Strategy’s 25 October holding of 848,517 BTC, and The Block’s treasury page showed BitMine at 0.43x, roughly half the reading implied by BitMine’s own holdings and its market capitalisation of about $11.79 billion. A difference that large usually comes from a share count or holdings figure that has not been updated.

BitMine’s case also shows how mNAV can mislead in the other direction. Its headline $14.5 billion figure includes $498 million of cash and securities and stakes in other companies, so comparing market cap with the full figure gives a deeper discount than comparing it with the ether alone. More than 5.2 million of its ETH was staked as of 1 November 2026, which produces income that a pure mNAV calculation ignores.

The MSCI rule and why index status feeds back into mNAV

Index eligibility has become the newest pressure on the premium. On 15 October 2026, MSCI finalised a rule treating “non-operating companies” as ineligible for its Global Investable Market Indexes, implementing a proposal first floated in August with minor changes. The rule takes effect at the close of 30 November 2026 as part of the November index review, and MSCI is due to publish the list of affected companies on 11 November.

The main two steps

The method works in two steps. A core screen first identifies issuers that lack substantial operating assets and behave like passive investment vehicles. Companies that fail that screen then face five financial ratio tests, and a stock is flagged as ineligible if it fails four or more of them. Buffers apply: an existing index member is removed only if it fails in each of its two most recent annual filing periods, while a new company is blocked if it fails in either.

The decision reverses MSCI’s position from 6 January 2026, when it chose not to exclude digital asset treasury companies at its February review. Instead, for companies whose digital assets made up 50% or more of total assets, it froze increases to their index share counts and deferred new additions and size-segment migrations. That interim treatment now falls away, and all such firms are assessed under the new rules. Strategy’s Michael Saylor and chief executive Phong Le had earlier described the proposal as “discriminatory”.

Index removal matters for mNAV because it forces tracking funds to sell the shares regardless of the treasury’s value. That selling can push the stock lower while the coins stay where they are, which widens a discount or erases a premium. Exclusion would leave each company’s crypto untouched while removing a large group of automatic buyers from the shareholder register, at the moment many DATs are trying to rebuild their premiums.

The limits of mNAV

The ratio has drawn serious criticism from inside the bitcoin industry. In September 2025, NYDIG’s global head of research Greg Cipolaro wrote that the industry definition of mNAV “needs to be deleted and forgotten”, arguing that market cap divided by digital asset value is misleading for two reasons. It gives no credit to operating businesses, such as Strategy’s software segment, and it often uses an assumed share count that treats unconverted convertible bonds as equity, even though holders of those bonds would demand cash if conversion terms are unmet.

The future of finance is here. Trade crypto and more

Weaknesses of mNAV

Several further weaknesses follow from the 2026 experience.

• Formula choice. As the Strategy example shows, basic, enterprise and net methods can disagree by 30 percentage points or more on the same day, so any single number needs its definition attached.
• Share count lag. Companies issuing through at-the-market programmes change their share count weekly, and trackers that update monthly can misstate mNAV by several percentage points.
• Face-value claims. Enterprise and net versions usually add debt and preferred stock at notional value, even when those securities trade below par, which overstates the claims during stress.
• Ignored liabilities and assets. Deferred tax, leases, staking income and operating cash flow sit outside most versions, and they can matter a great deal for companies with real businesses attached. Tax alone can be large: under the fair-value accounting rules for corporate bitcoin, gains and losses run through net income, and Strategy reversed a $4.12 billion deferred tax asset at 30 September 2026 once its holdings moved back above cost.
• Pricing source. Coin prices differ slightly across venues and timestamps, which matters most for smaller tokens with thin liquidity.

The core question the ratio asks, whether the stock is cheap or expensive relative to its coins, remains the right one for a company whose main asset is a token. The weakness lies in treating one tracker’s number as a fact.

How to read mNAV before buying a treasury stock

The practical answer to all those caveats is to rebuild the number yourself from the company’s latest filing. Five checks cover most of the risk.

1. Confirm the formula: Find out whether the figure you are reading is basic, diluted, enterprise or net, and read the company’s own definition if it publishes one.
2. Use the latest share count: Take the share count from the most recent filing or at-the-market update, and add any convertibles that are already in the money.
3. Map the capital stack: List debt, preferred stock and cash reserves, and check which of them rank ahead of common shareholders in a wind-down.
4. Compare like with like: When comparing two companies, apply the same formula to both, because one company’s dashboard figure and another’s tracker figure are rarely built the same way.
5. Watch the trend and the policy: A premium that is shrinking while the company keeps issuing stock is a warning sign, while a stated rule such as “no common issuance below 1.0x” tells you how management will behave as the ratio moves.

For investors who simply want exposure to the coin, the comparison point is the cost of owning it directly through a regulated exchange or a spot bitcoin ETF. A treasury stock at a premium only makes sense if the extra accumulation per share is likely to outrun that premium, and a stock at a discount only makes sense if something is likely to close the gap.