Digital Asset Treasuries Draw In $2.6B Amid Crypto Market Uncertainty

Digital asset treasuries have recorded their strongest streak of inflows in seven weeks, notching over $2.6 billion in institutional capital inflows despite broad crypto market uncertainty.

These treasuries saw $1.36 billion in net inflows between December 8 and 14, comprising $940 million into Bitcoin trusts, $423 million into Ethereum, and $724,000 into Bittensor, with a minor $2.55 million outflow from Solana products, according to DeFiLlama data.

A closer look at the data shows that Bitcoin treasury company Strategy acquired BTC on two instances. On December 7, the company purchased 10,624 BTC, valued at $962.69 million. A week later, on December 15, it secured 10,645 BTC, valued at $980.28 million. In total, the company purchased nearly $2 billion worth of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is currently hovering around $87,170, down 3.4% over the past week, according to CoinGecko data. Still, at BTC’s present value, Strategy’s 671,270 BTC holdings are worth roughly $58.26 billion.

Despite its significant accumulation of BTC, the company’s market net asset value (mNAV) has continued to decline and is currently hovering around 0.91. An mNAV below one often poses problems for the company in raising fresh cash to acquire digital assets.

Strategy’s dropping mNAV is in line with the crypto market’s cautious outlook.

Users on prediction market Myriad, owned by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, assign only a 32% chance that Strategy’s mNAV will hit 1.5 rather than 0.85, reflecting the cautious sentiment.

In recent weeks, Strategy launched a $1.44 billion cash reserve to help pay stockholder dividends and mitigate the need to sell any of its Bitcoin holdings.

An institutional “flight to quality”

The inflow trend accelerated the following week, with preliminary data from December 15 to 21 showing an additional $980 million in inflows to Bitcoin and $313 million into Ethereum.

“The primary driver of this surge is the December 10 Federal Reserve rate cut, which injected fresh liquidity and lowered the cost of leverage for institutional arbitrageurs,” Jimmy Xue, Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer of quantitative yield protocol Axis, told Decrypt.

He highlighted a critical regulatory catalyst: the new FASB accounting standard (ASU 2023-08), which took effect this year.

“This macro shift coincides with the first mandatory year… allowing companies to report crypto price appreciation as net income for the first time,” Xue said. “While the timing is a tactical, year-end move to optimize FY2025 balance sheets, it signals a structural reversal toward treating digital assets as a permanent category of marketable securities.”

The flow concentration reveals a specific institutional mindset. The overwhelming focus on Bitcoin and Ethereum reflects a “flight to quality” toward assets with the deep liquidity required for large-scale treasury movements, according to Xue.

The inclusion of a niche asset like Bittensor, however, was driven by a specific event—its December 12 halving—and the launch of the Grayscale Bittensor Trust, suggesting that institutional appetite remains focused on core indices and high-conviction narrative bets rather than on broad diversification.

These substantial inflows are directly impacting the valuation of the trusts themselves.

“These inflows indicate the narrowing of the 10–15% discount,” Xue noted, as cheaper capital allows investors to use DATs as leveraged proxies to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum at an effective discount.

Looking ahead, the analyst argues this validates the DAT structure’s competitive edge. For 2026, DATs remain viable against spot ETFs because they “can capture native staking yield, a feature most US spot ETFs cannot legally offer, and utilize assets for strategic M&A,” Xue said. This allows them to evolve into “active yield” vehicles, offering capital efficiency that passive ETF structures cannot replicate.