The 6 Best Bitcoin Treasury Stocks in 2026
The top 5 corporate Bitcoin holders control 985,000 BTC - 4.7% of every Bitcoin that will ever exist. This guide ranks them by what actually matters: BTC Yield, NAV premium, and debt risk.
Two years ago, one company owned this trade. Strategy. Michael Saylor's face was basically the ticker symbol. You wanted leveraged Bitcoin exposure through equities, you bought MSTR, end of discussion.
Now? There are 70+ public companies with Bitcoin on their balance sheets. The top five alone are sitting on 985,000 BTC, locked in corporate treasuries and growing weekly. Strategy still dwarfs everyone at 843,738 BTC, but the second-place name is one most people haven't even googled yet: Twenty One Capital, Jack Mallers' Tether-backed war chest that already holds 43,514 BTC.
But here's where people get it wrong. They look at the BTC count on the balance sheet and think that tells them something. It doesn't. Not by itself. What actually matters: how much Bitcoin does each share represent after all the dilution, is that number going up or down, and how much premium are you paying over just buying the damn coin yourself? (If you're considering borrowing against your BTC instead of selling, that's a different calculation entirely.)
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Quick Comparison: All 6 Treasury Stocks
| Company | Ticker | BTC Holdings | BTC Yield | Risk Level | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Strategy | MSTR | 843,738 ($63.9B) | +13.3% YTD | Medium |
| 2 | Twenty One Capital | XXI | 43,514 ($3.3B) | N/A | High |
| 3 | Metaplanet | 3350 | 40,177 ($3.0B) | +2.8% YTD | Medium-High |
| 4 | MARA Holdings | MARA | 35,303 ($2.7B) | Negative | High |
| 5 | Strive | ASST | 16,500 ($1.27B) | +13.8% QTD | Medium-High |
| 6 | GameStop | GME | 4,710 ($356M) | N/A | Low-Medium |
Hold On - Why Not Just Buy Bitcoin?
I get it. If you want Bitcoin, buy Bitcoin. A spot Bitcoin ETF like iShares IBIT (see our ETF Options Guide) runs you 0.25% a year and tracks price within basis points. Simple. Liquid. Works great in an IRA. Done.
So why bother with these stocks? One word: leverage. And you don't need a margin account to get it.
What is BTC Yield? BTC Yield measures the percentage change in Bitcoin per diluted share. Think of it as: "is my slice of the pie getting bigger or smaller?" If a company doubles its BTC but triples its share count, each share now represents less Bitcoin. That's a negative BTC Yield - and that's bad. Strategy's 13.3% means each MSTR share represents 13.3% more Bitcoin than January 1.
When Strategy issues convertible notes at 0-2% interest to buy Bitcoin, they're making a bet that BTC appreciates at 30%+ per year. If they're right, shareholders get juiced returns. If they're wrong, the debt is still due. That's the game. And right now, Saylor's winning it.
Not everybody pulls this off. Some companies dilute shareholders into oblivion without growing the stack proportionally. That's not a Bitcoin treasury. That's a slow rug pull in a suit.
#1. Strategy (MSTR)
Let's be honest: Strategy is not a software company. It's a Bitcoin vacuum cleaner with a legacy enterprise software business stapled to the side generating ~$500M/year. The software exists to give the debt machine a cash flow base. That's it.
The scale is absurd. 843,738 BTC at an average cost of $75,537/coin. At today's $75,700, they're basically flat on cost. But who cares about the entry price? The magic is the BTC Yield. Convertible notes, ATM equity, preferred stock - all of it gets immediately converted into Bitcoin. The result: 13.3% more Bitcoin per diluted share this year. That's 89,378 BTC of value conjured through financial engineering. Not mining. Not buying the dip. Paperwork.
Here's where it gets interesting. MSTR trades at roughly $134, with about 220,900 sats per diluted share. At $75K Bitcoin, that's ~$167 in BTC per share. So MSTR is trading at a 20% discount to its own Bitcoin. That almost never happens. For most of 2024-2025, the stock commanded a 40-100%+ premium. Is this a screaming buy or the market telling you the leverage game has a ceiling? You decide.
Oh, and central banks are now buying MSTR stock. Sovereign nations. Buying shares of a former software company. Because it holds Bitcoin. We are so far through the looking glass.
#2. Twenty One Capital (XXI)
This one's wild. Jack Mallers - the guy who built Strike, the guy who got El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender on stage at a conference - went public through a SPAC merger with Cantor Equity Partners in late 2025. Behind him: Tether, Bitfinex, and SoftBank. The company exists for one reason: stack sats. That's it. That's the business model.
43,514 BTC in the treasury and climbing. But the real story is the proposed mega-merger. Tether wants to combine XXI with Strike (Mallers' payments company) and Elektron Energy (one of the world's largest private Bitcoin miners at ~50 EH/s - roughly 5% of global hashrate). If this goes through, you get one company that mines Bitcoin, holds Bitcoin, and lets you spend Bitcoin. Vertically integrated Bitcoin from the ground up.
The stock chart looks like a heart attack. 52-week range of $5.61 to $53.00. Currently sitting at $8.50 - that's 84% below the high. Either this is one of the most asymmetric bets in the market or the market is screaming at you about the governance. Mallers is CEO of both XXI and Strike. He's on both sides of a merger he proposed. That's... a thing.
If you believe in the Tether machine and want that early-MSTR accumulation energy, XXI is your play. Tether's backing gives it essentially unlimited capital. But there's no sugarcoating the tail risk.
#3. Metaplanet (3350)
A Tokyo-listed hotel company pivoted to Bitcoin. I'm not making that up. Metaplanet ran hotels, decided that was boring, and went full Saylor in 2024. It worked - kind of. 40,177 BTC makes them the third-largest corporate holder on the planet, having leapfrogged MARA Holdings in April.
BTC Yield is positive at 2.8% YTD, so the per-share math checks out. But the stock is down 25% this year. Read that twice. Positive BTC Yield, negative stock performance. That disconnect is the most important thing to understand about treasury stocks: the market can reprice the premium it's willing to pay, and when it does, the stock drops even while the strategy technically works.
The pain is in the cost basis. Metaplanet bought most of its BTC around $97K. Today it's $75.7K. That's roughly $850M in unrealized losses just sitting there on the balance sheet. The bull case is obvious: Bitcoin rips back above $97K and this thing turns into a rocket ship. The bear case is equally obvious: they levered up to buy the top. Pick your adventure.
#4. MARA Holdings (MARA)
MARA is what happens when the music stops and you still have debt to pay.
They started 2026 holding 53,822 BTC. By March 25, they'd fire-sold 15,133 coins - 28% of the entire stack - for $1.1 billion. Reason? Debt payments. This is the nightmare scenario every Bitcoin treasury investor should tattoo on their forearm: forced selling at exactly the wrong time.
The stock got destroyed. MARA has underperformed both Bitcoin and MSTR this year, and it's not particularly close.
What's left isn't nothing: 35,303 BTC plus one of the world's largest mining operations at 50+ EH/s. Mining generates fresh Bitcoin daily, which helps refill the treasury drip by drip. But the damage isn't really about the numbers. It's about the narrative. When a company that markets itself as "never selling" dumps 28% of its stack... yeah. Investors remember.
#5. Strive (ASST)
Strive is what happens when a former presidential candidate decides the real power play is Bitcoin treasury management.
Vivek Ramaswamy co-founded Strive, which went public through a reverse merger with Asset Entities (ticker ASST) in late 2025. Since then, they've accumulated 16,500 BTC - roughly $1.27 billion - making them the seventh-largest public Bitcoin holder on the planet. Zero to 16,500 BTC in about eight months. That's aggressive accumulation that even Strategy would respect.
The numbers are impressive. BTC Yield hit 22.2% in Q4 2025 and is running at 13.8% quarter-to-date - those are Strategy-tier numbers. The mNAV (enterprise value to Bitcoin NAV) sits at 1.30x, meaning you're paying a 30% premium for every dollar of Bitcoin they hold. Not cheap, but not the 100%+ premiums MSTR commanded at its peak.
The real innovation is SATA - Strive's preferred stock that pays a 13% annual dividend, paid daily, backed by the Bitcoin treasury. Michael Saylor himself called it "the most interesting story in Bitcoin right now" and Strategy bought $50M of SATA. When Saylor is buying your product, you're doing something right.
The risk? Strive bought most of its stack at elevated prices. Unrealized losses are north of $500M. If Bitcoin doesn't recover above their average cost basis, the math on those dividend payments gets uncomfortable fast. But with Ramaswamy's political connections and Saylor's explicit endorsement, this isn't some no-name accumulator. It's a bet on Bitcoin financial engineering with serious backers.
#6. GameStop (GME)
I want to like this one. I really do.
GameStop is sitting on $4+ billion in cash. Four. Billion. They bought 4,710 BTC. That's less than 10% of what they could afford. Then? Radio silence. No second buy. No DCA plan. No BTC Yield framework. No convertible notes. No nothing. Just one press release and crickets.
Here's the bull case, and it's a real one: $4B in dry powder waiting to deploy at what might be a generational Bitcoin entry point. If Ryan Cohen wakes up one morning and goes full Saylor, this stock gaps up 40% before lunch.
The bear case: it's GameStop. Nobody knows what Ryan Cohen is doing. Possibly including Ryan Cohen.
How to Spot a Good Treasury Stock
Stop looking at the BTC count. Seriously. A company can hold 100,000 Bitcoin and still be a terrible investment.
BTC Yield is the whole ballgame. It tells you whether each share of stock represents more or less Bitcoin over time, after accounting for all the dilution from new shares and debt issuance. Strategy's 13.3% YTD? That means every share got 13.3% richer in BTC terms since January. If BTC Yield is negative, the company is literally making your shares worth less Bitcoin with every financing round. Run.
NAV Premium/Discount. Take the company's market cap and divide by the market value of its Bitcoin. If you're paying $2 for every $1 of BTC, that's a 100% premium. MSTR trading at a discount to NAV right now is unusual and worth paying attention to.
Debt Structure. This is where MARA went wrong and Strategy keeps getting it right. There's a world of difference between 0% convertible notes that convert at a premium and high-interest debt with hard maturity dates. Always check the maturity schedule. Always.
70+ companies now hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets, but only a handful are doing it well. The metric that separates winners from losers isn't total BTC count - it's BTC Yield. If each share of stock doesn't represent more Bitcoin over time, the "treasury strategy" is just a marketing stunt with a management fee you didn't agree to.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it better to buy MSTR or Bitcoin directly?
It depends on your thesis. Bitcoin directly (or through a spot ETF like IBIT at 0.25%/year) gives you 1:1 BTC exposure. MSTR gives you leveraged exposure - amplified upside if Bitcoin rises, amplified downside if it falls - plus the BTC Yield component. If Strategy maintains positive BTC Yield, each MSTR share represents increasingly more Bitcoin over time. That's the value proposition. The risk is the leverage.
What is BTC Yield and why does it matter?
BTC Yield measures the percentage change in Bitcoin per diluted share over a period. When a company issues new shares or debt to buy Bitcoin, BTC Yield tells you whether the purchase was accretive (good) or dilutive (bad) on a per-share basis. A company that doubles its BTC but triples its share count has a negative BTC Yield - each share now represents less Bitcoin. Strategy's 13.3% YTD BTC Yield means shareholders are getting richer in BTC terms despite the dilution.
Which Bitcoin treasury stock has the most upside?
Twenty One Capital (XXI) has the widest range of outcomes. Trading at $8.50 with a 52-week high of $53, the Strike + Elektron merger could be transformational or a governance disaster. High risk, high conviction. For safer leveraged BTC exposure, Strategy (MSTR) remains the gold standard with the strongest BTC Yield track record.
Why did MARA sell its Bitcoin?
MARA sold 15,133 BTC in March 2026 for $1.1 billion to pay down debt. This is the risk of leveraged Bitcoin treasury strategies - when debt comes due and Bitcoin hasn't rallied enough, you're forced to sell at potentially the worst time. It's why debt structure matters more than BTC count.
Does Tesla count as a Bitcoin treasury stock?
Technically, Tesla holds 11,509 BTC (~$871M). But on a $800B+ market cap, that's roughly 0.1% of the company's value. It doesn't move the stock, it's not a strategic priority, and Elon hasn't signaled any intention to accumulate more. It's a rounding error, not a treasury strategy.
*NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. This article discusses leveraged financial instruments and corporate treasury strategies. Nothing in this piece constitutes a recommendation to buy any stock or digital asset. All investments carry substantial risk of loss. Do your own research.
Related guides: Bitcoin ETF Options Guide | Bitcoin Inheritance Planning | Bitcoin Loans vs Selling*
Last updated May 27, 2026.
About 21Rates: 21Rates is an independent Bitcoin financial services comparison platform. Compare Bitcoin ETFs, custody providers, lenders, exchanges, and more with real-time data and unbiased research.
Sean Ristau | @SeanRistau | 21Rates / The Daily Stack