Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Thursday, February 19th.

Today on Forbes, Bitcoin's crash is putting crypto treasury stocks to the test.

Crypto is back in the gutter.

Bitcoin has been below $70,000, down roughly 50% from its October highs. And the pain is sharpest for a new

class of public companies that spent 2025 reinventing themselves as crypto hoarders, the so-called

digital asset treasuries, or debts. There were more than 200 of these firms, collectively sitting on roughly $150 billion in crypto

at the end of 2025, comprising an entire mini-industry modeled after Michael Saylor's strategy,

the $44 billion market cap Bitcoin buying behemoth that transformed itself from a small,

forgettable software company

into the corporate champion of adding Bitcoin to your balance sheet. But even before the latest

leg down, many Dats were already trading at discounts to the market value of their crypto. Now that

tokens are sliding again, these stocks are falling faster than the assets they hold,

racking up paper losses and making it harder to follow the Sailor Playbook of continuous

crypto buying.

Data provider Artemis estimates Dats are down more than $20 billion in aggregate.

Strategy alone reported an operating loss of $17.4 billion in

Q4 2025, and its stock is down nearly 70% over the past six months. Bitmine immersion technologies,

in Ethereum Treasury Analog, based in Las Vegas, is sitting on $8.1 billion in unrealized losses,

with its stock down a similar 66%.

While these companies have managed to keep their market to net asset value, or MNAV ratio,

indicating a premium-slash-discount to underlying crypto-holdings, near or slightly above

1.0, dozens of smaller debts have fallen to deep discounts, not only making it difficult to raise

...