Digital asset treasuries have become one of the most prominent features of the current crypto bull market. So-called DATs are businesses that acquire a hoard of a given cryptocurrency, from Bitcoin to Dogecoin, and seek to operate a publicly-traded vehicle that provides sell exposure to those assets in the form of shares. But with the number of projects ballooning, critics have warned that digital asset treasuries, or DATs, could be the latest crash in the rollercoaster sector. In the latest episode of Fortune’s Crypto Playbook (which you can find on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube), Tom Lee, the longtime analyst and chairman of the leading DAT BitMine, said that the bubble might already have burst.
Lee first learned about Bitcoin while serving as the chief strategist at JPMorgan in 2012, starting his own research company Fundstrat a few years later and building a reputation as an outspoken Bitcoin bull when much of Wall Street was still skeptical. In June, he became a crypto executive himself, joining a little-known publicly traded Bitcoin mining company called BitMine as it sought to rebrand itself into the largest institutional holder of Ethereum.
The software CEO Michael Saylor pioneered the approach with his company MicroStrategy, which began accumulating large stockpiles of Bitcoin in 2020, quickly becoming a way for investors to get access to the volatile cryptocurrency through a publicly traded vehicle, long before the approval of exchange-traded funds. The idea for BitMine was to do the same but for Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency.
Though Ethereum has at times struggled in recent years amid the proliferation of other blockchains and its own technical challenges, Lee argued that it is still the “blockchain of Wall Street,” especially as financial firms explore the implementation of stablecoins and different tokenized assets, many of them native to Ethereum.
BitMine, whose market capitalization sits above $15 billion, holds over three million Ethereum tokens, or around 2.5% of the total supply, though Lee’s goal is to acquire 5%. While investors have more options to buy top cryptocurrencies than when Saylor began accumulating Bitcoin for MicroStrategy, Lee argues that BitMine still offers advantages, from reaping staking rewards to being included on major stock indexes. “We’re essentially a liaison between how Wall Street views future upgrades to Ethereum,” Lee said.
That doesn’t mean that digital asset treasury companies as a broader asset class will prove successful, especially as more launch to hold different types of cryptocurrencies, including so-called “alt” coins such as Sam Altman’s Worldcoin. Lee pointed out that many DATs are trading below their net asset value, or the worth of their underlying crypto holdings, as an increasing number launch into the public market. “If that’s not already a bubble burst,” Lee asked, “How would that bubble burst?”