DAT Company's "Side Hustle Survival": After the crypto hoarding flywheel stalls, they begin self-rescue

Original Title: “DAT Companies Start Side Businesses”
Original Author: Eric, Foresight News

How long has it been since you last heard news about Metaplanet?

In the first quarter of 2026, Japan’s—indeed, all of Asia’s—largest Bitcoin treasury company adjusted its capital strategy. It chose not to dilute equity when mNAV is below 1 (i.e., the ratio of company market value to the value of the cryptocurrencies it holds is less than 1). Instead, it shifted to strategies including Bitcoin-collateralized financing and share buybacks, maintaining the stock price to some extent.

Although the first-quarter financial report showed that Metaplanet was still buying 5,075 Bitcoins, since the start of the second quarter and up to now, apart from announcing the acquisition of Japan-licensed securities firm Siiibo Securities about a week ago to promote bond products backed by Bitcoin and explore securities tokenization,

Even Strategy—the company that has repeatedly promised it would never sell Bitcoin—has also tried selling small amounts of Bitcoin to supplement cash, and the market impact of that has been felt. The once “never sell” pledge has turned into “a commitment to increasing total holdings.” When DAT companies with the top two Bitcoin reserves are already running short, it’s not hard to imagine how constrained other companies are right now.

In fact, aside from a handful of companies—including Strategy, Metaplanet, and BitMine—that are still sticking with the approach, most former DAT companies have started looking for other ways out.

Two routes for survival

In an unexpectedly brutal bear market, many DAT companies simply chose to “stop playing.”

ETHZilla is a typical example. Backed by Peter Thiel, the company held more than 90,000 ETH at its peak in 2025. But by the end of that year, it sold ETH twice totaling $115 million to repay debts. This year, it directly gave up the DAT model and pivoted to businesses such as RWA tokenization.

Bitcoin DAT companies such as Prenetics Global and Sequans Communications also chose to abandon it and return to their core businesses. Many copycat altcoin DAT companies are even more so—stock prices are close to zero, the coins they hold are hard to liquidate, so they simply give up and “lie flat.” Data shows that in July 2025 alone, DAT companies bought a total of roughly $20 billion worth of cryptocurrencies in a single month. But this year’s first-quarter total purchases were only about $3.7 billion.

With the flywheel coming to a standstill, aside from exiting and giving up, the treasury companies in the mid-tier have started a collective strategic pivot that can roughly be summarized into three directions. They all point to a core proposition: DAT must change from being a passive asset-liability manager into an active ecosystem participant in order to truly have commercial value.

The first direction is to reposition themselves as institutional-grade crypto asset management platforms and yield funds. SharpLink Gaming is perhaps the representative case. From day one, this company put nearly 100% of its ETH holdings into staking, and it assigns all staking rewards to shareholders with no cut taken.

This sharply contrasts with spot ETH ETFs. Although they received SEC staking approval, to meet daily liquidity requirements in practice they can only allocate about 50% of their holdings to staking. On that basis, in early 2026 SharpLink partnered with Galaxy Digital—a long-established Wall Street crypto investment bank—to launch the $125 million “Galaxy Sharplink On-Chain Yield Fund,” putting about $100 million worth of staked ETH into DeFi liquidity protocols in search of excess returns.

The company is shifting from being merely a crypto holdings firm to becoming a management platform that provides institutional clients with an on-chain yield allocation channel.

The exploration by GameSquare—holding about 15,000 ETH—is even more aggressive. This publicly listed company, which has gaming assets such as FaZe Clan, partnered with crypto asset management firm Dialectic to introduce Dialectic’s self-developed Medici platform. The platform uses machine learning models and automated algorithms to dynamically allocate funds among 72 to 250 different DeFi protocols, targeting annualized returns of 8% to 14%, far above Ethereum’s standard staking benchmark of 3% to 4%.

The second direction is to transform into a blockchain infrastructure operator—especially clearly seen in the Solana ecosystem. DeFi Development is the farthest along. Not only did this company buy large amounts of SOL, it also acquired validator companies and launched its own liquid staking token, dfdvSOL.

dfdvSOL has been integrated into multiple core Solana DeFi protocols, including Kamino, Orca, Drift, and Jupiter Lend. It is used as collateral for lending and as an asset in liquidity pools. DeFi Development earns fee income from each staking operation and from protocol integrations, building a self-reinforcing network effects cycle.

SOL Strategies has built a complete business line—from digital asset holdings to infrastructure operations—by acquiring three validator companies. It manages delegated staked SOL exceeding 3.4 million, far beyond the scale of its own treasury. It is shifting from serving its own balance sheet to providing staking infrastructure for institutional clients across the entire ecosystem.

Forward Industries is similar. In addition to launching the liquid staking token fwdSOL, Forward Industries also partnered with Galaxy Digital and Jump Crypto to launch the propAMM project BisonFi. After BisonFi launched, it quickly sprinted to become the DEX with the highest trading volume on Solana. The once-dominant HumidiFi was squeezed down to hold less than 4% of the share.

At a fundamental level, these two routes also correspond to different attitudes in the capital markets toward Ethereum and Solana.

Ethereum’s recognition as an “asset” is still higher than Solana’s. ETH treasury companies can position themselves as “ETH funds,” offering institutional investors exposure to assets that can generate returns. On the other hand, Solana’s more “crypto-native” attribute is more pronounced, meaning SOL treasury companies need to demonstrate their profitability in this ecosystem—aligning more with the logic of ordinary listed companies “looking at financial reports” to extract and present their value.

Can the transition succeed?

The collective transition by DAT companies actually reflects a profound cognitive upgrade happening across the entire crypto industry. The treasury model originally pioneered by Strategy is essentially a financial engineering approach that uses the convenience of public-market financing and investor sentiment to perform capital arbitrage. When participants expanded from a small number of early movers to hundreds of companies, and from Bitcoin to various altcoins, scarcity was diluted and the premium would naturally disappear.

The launch of crypto ETFs further accelerated this process. When investors can buy ETH ETFs with staking yield at prices close to net asset value through traditional brokerage accounts, the logic of holding DAT stocks at a premium is fundamentally shaken.

The answers given by successful transformation cases point to operational capability. Whether it’s SharpLink’s 100% staking strategy and institutional yield fund, DeFi Development’s dfdvSOL ecosystem and validator network, or GameSquare’s machine-learning-driven yield platform, they are all trying to build operational moats around crypto assets that are difficult to replicate. Such moats may come from technological advantages, network effects, institutional partnership relationships, or deep participation in on-chain financial ecosystems.

However, these transitions are not without risks. The 8% to 14% DeFi yield pursued by GameSquare is built on smart contract risk and protocol risk; any major vulnerability in a DeFi protocol or a market extreme event could lead to severe losses. DeFi Development’s business model heavily depends on the healthy development of the Solana network; once the ecosystem cools off, the entire business would be hit.

For the Web 3.0 market, the impact of this transition is far-reaching and complex. Those DAT companies that successfully evolve into infrastructure operators and asset management platforms are building bridges between traditional finance and blockchain ecosystems, promoting the maturity and standardization of institutional services.

But the DAT model’s shift from frenzy to calm also sends an important signal to the market: in crypto, pure capital games are not for everyone. Entities that genuinely participate in network building, create real cash flow, and provide user value are more resilient across cycles.

The DAT movement is moving from a capital carnival into a phase of calm restructuring. This may not be bad news. An industry can only truly see who is swimming naked and who is building the ark after the bubble deflates. The collective turn by treasury companies is both a passive response to survival pressure and the inevitable growing pain as an emerging industry matures.

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