Matt Levine, Columnist

Cracking Open the DATs

DAT activism, IPO index inclusion, Fannie/Freddie IPOs, prediction market performance, free groceries and Wagnerian opera.

February 4, 2026 at 6:55 PM UTC

By Matt Levine

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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For a while, you could sell $1 of Bitcoin for $2 on the stock exchange. If you had a pot of $100 million of Bitcoin, you could pop that into a public company, and the company’s shares would be worth $200 million. This was a hugely popular trade — the “digital asset treasury company” trade, or DAT — and lots of people with stashes of crypto did it. Good trade.

But then it collapsed. Now you can’t sell $1 of Bitcoin for $2 on the stock exchange anymore. Strategy Inc., which pioneered the DAT strategy, is trading at about a 9% premium to net asset value, down from more than 100% at the peak, but many of the copycats are trading at significant discounts to NAV. These days, $1 of crypto might trade at 80 cents on the stock exchange.