DAT Stocks Are on Sale. Are They a Buy? Plus, Why Crypto Is Dead - Ep.985

I spoke with a number of people for the story, and they all kinda said that once everything shakes out and it's not entirely clear when that's gonna happen, the n naps for these companies should be somewhere around one. Welcome back, everyone. Crypto prices are down. Bitcoin is off about 30% from its recent highs, and Ether has dropped even more. But some digital asset treasury stocks or DATs are trading at even deeper discounts. In some cases, valued at half of their crypto holdings. These are companies that stockpile Bitcoin and ETH on their balance sheet, and during the bull run, many traded at massive premiums, But now with sentiment fading, they flipped. Some investors think that means it's time to buy. Others are saying not so fast. To help us unpack it all, we're joined by Unchained executive editor, Steve Ehrlich, who dug into this in a new article that we just published. If you're watching this on x, we should be posting this link, in the first comment. If you're on YouTube, it is in the show notes. Welcome, Steve. Hey, Laura. So you just came out with an article about how many digital asset treasuries or dApps are trading at a massive discount, and you looked into whether or not, they might be a good buy. But before we dive into all our particulars, why don't we just make sure listeners have, you know, some of these basic definitions and understandings down? So explain what a DAT is and, you know, this concept of NAV and MNAV. Yeah. Thanks. So DAT stands for digital asset treasury. Even if you're not familiar with the term, I would imagine most people watching this, are aware of strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, that has amassed tens of billions of dollars of Bitcoin since it, started accumulating the asset back in August 2020. Essentially, these companies now it took about five years or so, but, a lot of these companies are are copycats, like, very explicitly following the the Michael Sailor strategy playbook of trying to find ways to, stockpile assets, Bitcoin, eat Solana, and then a lot of long tail assets, in a way that is accretive from a capital point of view where the tokens keeps increasing, lets you raise more money to buy, more of the asset, and then you wanna kinda create this, like, self perpetuating flywheel cycle of of generating additional value for, for shareholders. It really took off like a like a rocket ship over the summer. I mean, billions and billions of dollars have been raised to funnel crypto into these companies. And for a while, it looked like a really smart business move. Many of these companies were trading at, m navs above one. Nav stands for, like, net asset value, m nav multiple. It's kind of similar to, in traditional finance, the the price to book ratio or or metric that people might look at when they're, when they're evaluating stocks. And …