Brief
- DATs saw more than $2.6 billion in inflows over two weeks, thanks to the Fed’s rate cut and new FASB accounting rules allowing crypto gains to be counted as net income.
- The focus on Bitcoin and Ethereum reflects a “flight to quality” toward significant liquidity, while niche entries like Bittensor are tied to specific events like its halving.
- Analysts say inflows reduce the DAT discount and the structures remain viable compared to ETFs due to their ability to capture stake returns and enable strategic mergers and acquisitions.
Digital asset treasuries recorded their strongest streak of inflows in seven weeks, recording over $2.6 billion in institutional capital inflows despite widespread crypto market uncertainty.
These Treasuries saw net inflows of $1.36 billion between December 8 and 14, including $940 million Bitcoin trusts, $423 million in Ethereumand $724,000 in Bittensor, with a minor release of $2.55 million from Solana products, according to data from DeFiLlama.
A closer look at the data shows that treasury company Bitcoin Strategy has acquired BTC twice. On December 7, the company purchased 10,624 BTC, worth $962.69 million. A week later, on December 15, he obtained 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 current value, Strategy’s 671,270 BTC holdings are worth approximately $58.26 billion.
Despite its significant BTC accumulation, the company’s market net asset value (mNAV) has continued to decline and is currently hovering around 0.91. An mNAV below 1 often poses problems for the company to raise new money to acquire digital assets.
The strategy’s mNAV decline is in line with the crypto market’s cautious outlook.
Users of the Myriad prediction market, owned by DecryptDastan’s parent company gives only a 32% chance that Strategy’s mNAV will reach 1.5 instead of 0.85, reflecting cautious sentiment.
In recent weeks, Strategy launched a $1.44 billion cash reserve to help pay dividends to shareholders and alleviate the need to sell any of its Bitcoin holdings.
An institutional “flight towards quality”
The trend in inflows accelerated the following week, with preliminary data from December 15-21 showing additional flows of $980 million to Bitcoin and $313 million to Ethereum.
“The main driver of this rise is the Federal Reserve’s Dec. 10 rate cut, which injected new liquidity and lowered the cost of leverage for institutional arbitrageurs,” said Jimmy Xue, co-founder and chief operating officer of quantitative yield protocol Axis. Decrypt.
He highlighted a key regulatory enabler: the FASB’s new accounting standard (ASU 2023-08), which took effect this year.
“This macroeconomic change 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 decision to optimize fiscal 2025 balance sheets, it signals a structural reversal toward treating digital assets as a permanent category of tradable securities.”
The concentration of flows reveals a specific institutional mentality. The overwhelming emphasis on Bitcoin And Ethereum According to Xue, this reflects a “flight to quality” towards assets with the significant liquidity needed for large-scale cash movements.
The inclusion of a niche asset like Bittensor, however, was driven by a specific event – its halving on December 12 – and the launch of the Grayscale Bittensor Trust, suggesting that institutional appetite remains focused on core indices and high-conviction narrative bets rather than broad diversification.
These significant inflows have a direct impact on the valuation of the trusts themselves.
“These inflows indicate a discount reduction of 10-15%,” 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 says this validates the competitive advantage of the DAT structure. For 2026, DATs remain viable compared to spot ETFs because they “can capture native stake yield, a feature that most US spot ETFs cannot legally offer, and use assets for strategic mergers and acquisitions,” Xue said. This allows them to move towards “active yield” vehicles, providing capital efficiency that passive ETF structures cannot replicate.
Daily debriefing Newsletter
Start each day with the biggest news stories of the day, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
