Companies That Hold Bitcoin: What the mNAV Premium Is and Why It Can Flip to a Discount
6 min read
Loading...
6 min read
Imagine a company that owns nothing except 1,000 bitcoin. At $60,000 a coin, that is $60 million.
Now imagine its shares are worth $90 million on the stock market. Why would anyone pay $90 million for $60 million of bitcoin?
Or the other way round. What if the shares are worth only $48 million? Why would the market sell you $60 million of bitcoin for $48 million?
Both happen. The gap has a name: mNAV. This post explains what it is, why it moves, and why the premium on bitcoin treasury companies turned into a discount in 2026.
A bitcoin treasury company is a listed business that keeps bitcoin on its balance sheet (its list of what it owns and owes). Some also run a normal business. Some are close to a pure bitcoin holder.
The best known is Strategy, listed in the US as MSTR. Others include Metaplanet in Japan.
For the stock market, these shares work like a way to get bitcoin exposure without opening a crypto account. That is where the premium comes from.
NAV means net asset value: what a company's assets are worth. The m stands for market. So mNAV compares the company's market value with the market value of its bitcoin.
There are two versions, and mixing them up causes most of the confusion:
Strategy describes its own measure the enterprise way, according to coverage of its disclosures. Trackers often show the basic one. The two can sit on opposite sides of 1 on the same day.
Take our company with 1,000 bitcoin at $60,000. The bitcoin is worth $60 million. This is an invented example, not a real firm.
| Market cap of the shares | mNAV | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| $90 million | 1.50 | Premium of 50% |
| $60 million | 1.00 | Fair, shares equal the coins |
| $48 million | 0.80 | Discount of 20% |
Why would anyone pay a premium? A few reasons people give: it is easy to buy on a stock account, some funds can hold stocks but not coins, and investors hope the company will keep growing its bitcoin per share.
A premium is not just bragging rights. It can be used.
Say the company sells new shares worth $9 million, 10% of its $90 million market cap. It uses the cash to buy about 150 bitcoin at $60,000.
Now it holds 1,150 bitcoin, spread over 10% more shares. Bitcoin per original share goes from 1,000 to about 1,045. Existing shareholders hold slightly more bitcoin each, without adding any money of their own.
That is the engine. The premium lets the company raise money cheaply and turn it into bitcoin per share.
The engine runs only above 1. At 1 or below, selling new shares to buy bitcoin makes each old share hold less bitcoin, not more.
So the buying slows or stops. People who paid a premium for the story see it vanish. Fewer buyers, falling bitcoin price and heavy obligations all feed each other.
That is roughly what happened in 2026:
We could not open every original page. Check the exact day and the version of mNAV before you compare any two numbers.
A discount does not mean a company is broke. It means the market is pricing something in. The usual candidates:
Be careful with the idea that a discount is a free lunch. Common shareholders sit behind debt and preferred holders, so a low mNAV does not give you a direct claim on the coins.
Some buy back their own shares. Metaplanet said it would strongly consider buybacks when its mNAV is below 1, and in October 2025 The Block reported a program of up to 150 million shares, running to 28 October 2026. The idea is simple arithmetic.
Using our example at 0.80: the company sells 133 bitcoin ($8 million) and uses it to retire a sixth of its shares. It now holds about 867 bitcoin over 83% of the shares. That is about 1,040 bitcoin per original share, up 4%.
The catch is that the company ends up with less bitcoin and perhaps less future growth. It only works if the discount is real and the money was not needed elsewhere.
A short checklist:
Open the Market page in NetWort and check how bitcoin and US stocks moved over the last week or month. Then look at the Strategy (MSTR) page next to Bitcoin. Compare the two lines. The gap between them over time is mNAV in picture form.