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Money Stuff: The Podcast · Friday, September 11, 2026

The Rise and Fall of DATs: A Story of Bitcoin Arbitrage

The podcast discusses 'Digital Asset Treasury' (DAT) companies, a trend from 2025 where public companies held large amounts of Bitcoin, allowing their stock to trade at a premium. Empory Digital, an electric motorcycle company, pivoted to being a DAT. This strategy worked until the premium disappeared, leading to DATs trading at a discount to their Bitcoin holdings, creating an arbitrage opportunity.

personGabby GlicksbergpersonTice BrowncompanyEmpory DigitalcompanyATG

The tape

3 quotes
So, Empory Digital is like an electric motorcycle company in the not very distant past. But in 2025, a thing that small public companies could do was they could just get a big stash of Bitcoin. And then, you know, if they had $100 million of Bitcoin, their stock would trade at like a $200 million valuation. And this is a great trade for people who had stashes of Bitcoin.
Max Abelson
And soon after that, the trade stopped working because there's never any reason that these stocks would trade at a premium to the Bitcoin. It's just like a thing that people got really into for a while. And so it stopped working and they stopped trading at premiums and often started trading at discounts to the value of their Bitcoin.
Max Abelson
Because what you do is buy up a DAT and then crack it open, sell all the Bitcoin, and it would sell for more than the value of the stock that you bought. So people started, I mean, not that many people. The idea of DAT activism became a thing.
Max Abelson
Heard on Money Stuff: The Podcast — “What's the Concern?, published Friday, September 11, 2026. Heardvine summarizes and quotes with attribution and timestamps, and links to the original everywhere.
Transcribed via publisher transcript · $0.00