Crypto Treasury Inflows Crash 95% to Lowest Since 2024

Crypto treasury companies pulled in just $180 million in May, the weakest monthly total since October 2024 and a 95% drop from April’s $4.4 billion, according to crypto data tracker DefiLlama. Bitcoin-focused firms took $177 million of that, leaving almost nothing for every other token on the board.

The slump lands as the financing trick behind these companies quietly stops working. Many now trade below the value of the coins they hold, which kills the share premium they relied on to keep buying more.

Bitcoin Carried Almost the Entire May Tally

Strip the month down to its parts and one asset does all the work. Of the $180 million that flowed into digital asset treasury (DAT, a listed company whose main business is accumulating crypto on its balance sheet) firms in May, Bitcoin vehicles took $177 million, or about 98%. Everything else was rounding error. Small top-ups went to ZCash, Story and Sui. Litecoin actually shed money, posting a $1.89 million outflow.

The speed of the fall is the story. March and April each cleared $4 billion, with Bitcoin alone drawing $3.8 billion in April. May came in roughly 93% below the average monthly haul from January through May, the kind of cliff that does not show up in a healthy market. The figures come from DefiLlama’s digital asset treasuries dashboard, which tracks corporate accumulation across tokens.

A month does not make a trend. But this is the lowest print in more than a year and a half, and it arrives after the market sell-off that hit crypto through the spring. Token-accumulation firms that pitched relentless buying now have to explain a month where the buying nearly stopped.

The Premium That Funded the Trade Flipped to a Discount

To see why the flows matter, you have to understand the machine that produced them. These companies did not just buy Bitcoin. They sold their own stock to fund the purchases, and that only works while the stock trades richer than the coins behind it.

What mNAV Measures

The metric investors watch is mNAV, short for market-cap-to-net-asset-value, the ratio of a treasury company’s stock-market value to the worth of the crypto on its books. When mNAV sits above 1, the company is worth more than its coins, so it can issue new shares, buy more Bitcoin, and lift the asset value backing every existing share. That loop, repeated, is what turned a handful of holders into multibillion-dollar accumulators. The premium was the fuel.

When the Discount Bites

That fuel has largely burned off. Several treasury firms now trade below the value of the coins they hold, a sharp reversal from premiums that once ran into the hundreds of percent. Metaplanet, a Japanese holder, commanded a premium of more than 230% last July before it cratered, per DL News reporting; Strategy, the company that pioneered the trade and whose holdings sit near the top of the public Bitcoin treasury holdings tracker, has watched its multiple fall from several times asset value toward parity. When mNAV drops under 1, issuing shares destroys value instead of creating it, and firms that borrowed to buy can be pushed toward selling coins to cover obligations. The premium era paid for the accumulation; the discount era ends it.

How the 2024 Election Built the Boom

The collapse reads differently once you remember how the boom started. Treasury inflows surged past $12 billion in the weeks after the 2024 US election, when a friendlier policy backdrop convinced public markets that holding crypto on a corporate balance sheet was a growth story rather than a gimmick. Dozens of small listed companies repurposed themselves into token vaults to ride it.

The heat faded faster than the headlines. DefiLlama’s figures show inflows cooling through 2025, holding below $10 billion a month until late summer, then slipping again. May’s number is what is left after the premium that justified all those launches drained out of the stocks. The vehicles built for the surge are now operating in a market that no longer rewards the pitch they were built around.

The era of buying bitcoin and calling it a treasury strategy is over.

That line came from Sean Kiernan, in an April essay for CoinDesk arguing the sector had to graduate from passive holding. Two months on, the May data reads like the market agreeing with him in cash.

Why ETFs Make the Premium Hard to Hold

Part of the problem is that the easy buyer found a cheaper door. Spot Bitcoin and Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs, listed funds that hold the underlying asset and trade like a stock) now give institutions low-cost, liquid crypto exposure without the corporate baggage of a treasury company. Arthur Firstov, chief business officer at crypto payments firm Mercuryo, has argued that ETFs make it structurally harder for listed treasury firms to keep trading at a premium, because an investor who just wants Bitcoin can buy a fund instead of betting on a holding company’s stock.

That competition gets sharper as the institutional channel matures. Grayscale’s research arm frames the period ahead as an institutional era for digital assets in its 2026 digital asset outlook, the exact environment in which a plain coin-holding wrapper has the least to offer. Firstov’s other point is blunter: staking can lift revenue for proof-of-stake treasuries, but it cannot fix weak operations, heavy share dilution or balance-sheet losses. A yield bolted onto a broken model is still a broken model.

From Holding the Asset to Earning on It

So the survivors are changing what a treasury company is for. Galaxy Digital has argued that buy-and-hold no longer carries the weight it did, and that firms need to put their assets to work. The shorthand making the rounds is DAT 1.0 to DAT 2.0, a move from parking coins to producing income from them.

Three Ways to Make a Treasury Earn

The active playbook breaks into a few distinct routes, each turning a static balance sheet into a revenue line:

• Infrastructure and staking – running validators or staking proof-of-stake tokens to earn protocol rewards, the most common path for Ether holders.
• Active trading and market income – option-writing and other strategies that generate cash from volatility rather than waiting on price.
• Credit and lending – deploying assets into collateralized loans or DeFi (decentralized finance) markets to capture a net interest margin.

Patrick Ngan, chief investment officer at Nasdaq-listed Zeta Network Group, has made the case that companies holding Bitcoin must show they can do more than park it, and that businesses with real cash flow are better placed than pure holders. Zeta itself leaned into that pitch with a $231 million Bitcoin-backed share placement aimed at building a working treasury rather than a dormant one.

The Hybrid Bet

The most literal version of cash-flow-plus-Bitcoin comes from real estate. Grant Cardone has stitched apartment buildings to Bitcoin in a treasury-style structure, using rent and property gains to fund steady BTC purchases through Cardone Capital’s blended Bitcoin and real estate funds. The thesis is the one the whole sector is backing into: a coin pile alone is no longer a business, but a coin pile fed by an operating income stream might be.

Whether that pivot is enough is the open question. A staking yield of a few percent does not replace a stock premium that once ran past 200%, and the firms that financed their hoards with debt have the least room to wait.

The Floor the Sector Is Watching

DefiLlama’s June tally posts in early July. Until then, $180 million is the number the treasury sector is trying not to fall through, and the easy-money phase that put these companies on the map is plainly behind them.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial or investment advice. Crypto treasury stocks and digital assets are volatile and carry a high risk of loss; consult a qualified financial professional before acting. Figures are accurate as of publication on June 3, 2026.