Bitcoin price goes nowhere as corporates pass BTC around
It’s difficult to imagine a more favorable environment for bitcoin (BTC) investors, yet its price is still below its $109,000 wick five months ago.
At a pace that has accelerated to almost a new company per day, hundreds of so-called BTC treasury companies are now amassing the asset for their shareholders.
Unfortunately, regular BTC investors are struggling to see any benefit.
At the start of the year, public and private companies held 590,649 BTC and 409,832 BTC, respectively. Six months later, they now hold a collective 1,139,748 BTC.
That 139,267 BTC or 14% increase in just six months is impressive, but it also illustrates the shifting market forces beneath the BTC price. That figure is, in fact, identical to the year-to-date rally of BTC itself.
In other words, these treasury companies have done little to boost the price of BTC.
Lacking any catalyst for a rally from treasury companies, BTC investors are searching for an explanation as to BTC’s crabbish behavior in 2025. Below are some of these partially satisfying answers.
BTC flowing from private to public
While BTC holdings at publicly traded companies skyrocketed 44% from 590,649 to 848,870, holdings at private companies actually declined 29% from 409,832 to 290,878.
Indeed, during the first half of 2025, demand for BTC shifted in a profound way. Dominated by individual investors and their non-public companies for about 15 years, a new crop of publicly-traded companies is rapidly displacing this traditional class of BTC investors.
Consider the privately held and curiously profitable BitMEX. Its holdings have declined 5% from 54,652 to 52,020 in six months. Elsewhere, Stone Ridge Holdings’ 10,889 BTC have declined 8% to 10,000 today.
In addition, the Tezos Foundation held 4,247 BTC six months ago but only holds 2,903 today — a 32% drop.
Tether and Bitfinex’s Twenty One (CEP), for example, seeded their publicly-traded treasury company with BTC that the sister companies already possessed.
In summary, while public company executives dazzle Wall Street with press releases about their purchases for BTC treasuries, some of those BTC seem to be simply flowing from private companies.
Needless to say, flows from private to public companies do not represent new demand.
Why BTC institutional adoption was a whimper
Consider the grand total of BTC in any type of treasury company — excluding government holdings, which are overwhelmingly re-labeled assets of civil forfeiture or criminal proceedings that governments already held before they re-labeled them crypto ‘stockpiles’ or “reserves.”
At the beginning of the year, BTC held by public and private companies, ETFs, funds, and DeFi/smart contracts totaled 2,434,631. Today, the total is 2,952,217, or an increase of just 21%.
BTC itself has rallied 15% this year.
Indeed, all of the treasury company hype and supposed institutional adoption over the past six months has exceeded the rally of BTC itself by a mere six percentage points.
Read more: Five tricks to using investor funds to buy bitcoin
Flows out of spot BTC into funds and companies
Consider also another underappreciated mechanism of capital markets affecting the price of BTC: selling BTC to buy BTC securities.
For example, spot BTC ETFs have enjoyed respectable inflows this year. At the start of the year, funds held 1,289,026 BTC. Today, they hold 9% more: 1,405,472 BTC.
However, net inflows into spot ETFs don’t necessarily represent new buying.
Indeed, many buyers of spot ETFs can be sellers of BTC itself. For estate planning, retirement tax advantages, or even personal safety reasons, swapping BTC for a BTC ETF is a common choice for certain investors.
Similarly, buyers of treasury companies like MicroStrategy (MSTR) can be simultaneous sellers of BTC itself.
Enchanted with the idea that people like Michael Saylor can accomplish accretive dilution, many BTC investors have sold BTC to buy BTC securities like ETFs, treasury companies, and other BTC-related products.
For every $1 of BTC sold to buy a security that must buy $1, the price impact is null.
Worse, some BTC securities own substantially less than their market cap in BTC. Every $1 in MSTR, for example, only provides exposure to about $0.57 worth of BTC.
So, sellers of BTC buying MSTR — even if they use all of their BTC sale proceeds to buy MSTR — have a near-term effect of depressing the price of BTC due to this mNAV premium embedded in many BTC securities.
Volatility compression means BTC price compression
Another explanation for the poor price performance of BTC amid its record-breaking adoption by institutions could be volatility compression.
After Bitcoin’s 2024 block reward halving, CME Group highlighted its unusually quiet period with shallower drawdowns and reduced volatility.
Partly attributable to more mature market participants and institutional adoption, not to mention a lack of any systemic collapses on the scale of FTX, trading in the asset has calmed to a reduced level of volatility.
Reduced volatility and highly predictable inflows, such as regular purchases by spot ETFs, can help keep the price of BTC from moving too dramatically.
A team of researchers at the University of São Paulo also highlighted BTC’s dampening volatility after its 2024 halving compared to previous halvings.
They cited increased government regulation and greater participation from institutional investors as contributing factors to dampened volatility.
More reasons why the BTC price is so boring
Other explanations for BTC’s underperformance blame altcoins, the maturity of BTC as an indexation asset rather than a speculative outperformer, macroeconomic factors like higher real yields, or the impact of proliferating BTC derivatives markets like options and futures on regulated exchanges around the world.
Gold, something of an archnemesis to BTC, has also had a particularly strong year. Year-to-date, gold has rallied 26%, trouncing BTC’s 16% performance and at more than 10 times its size.
Finally, the frenzied pace of treasury company creation has also drawn inflows away from spot BTC into highly speculative stocks.
Many treasury companies are overvalued by not just single or double-digit percentages atop their BTC holdings, but triple or quadruple-digit percentages.
Microcap companies, sometimes with less than $10 million in total value, have started announcing plans to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of BTC in order to benefit from a short-term price pump.
Even large-cap companies like Nakamoto (KDLY) have traded as high as 23x the value of their BTC holdings.
Read more: Deep-sea miner Green Minerals down 92%, wants to buy $1.2B bitcoin
This speculative fervor chasing short-term price appreciation could have also resulted in the selling of BTC itself. Unfortunately, major brokerage accounts don’t accept balances of BTC for day trading stocks.
In order to trade most of these treasury companies, BTC investors first have to sell BTC itself.
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