MSTR, ASST and BMNR: Crypto Spring Could be Good for These 3 Proxy Stocks

Wait… are crypto treasuries a thing again? 

It’s certainly looking that way. 

In mid-2025, in what will either be remembered as a pivotal moment or a weird aberration in the history of crypto, a motley crew of companies followed the approach pioneered by Strategy [MSTR] and became Digital Asset Treasury stocks (DATs).

These firms – ranging from struggling small caps to opportunistic crypto-native operators – realised public markets were willing to assign substantial premiums to balance sheets stuffed with volatile digital assets. The basic premise was simple: raise capital through equity or convertible debt, buy bitcoin [BTC] or another token, then hope the resulting treasury accumulation drove both the underlying asset and the company’s stock price higher. In effect, they transformed themselves into leveraged crypto holding vehicles wrapped in an equity story. 

For a time, the trade looked effective, particularly as retail investors and momentum funds piled into the sector. 

Then the crypto winter set in. Bitcoin and most major digital assets retraced sharply, funding conditions tightened, and the DAT model suddenly looked far less ingenious. Many of the weaker entrants saw their share prices collapse, logging losses that exceeded those of the cryptocurrencies they tracked – exactly what you would expect from a leveraged crypto proxy.

Recently, however, the BTC price has stabilised around the $75,000-82,000 band. 

It remains well below prior highs and down nearly 10% year-to-date as of 12 May. Nonetheless, some more bullish voices have interpreted this as a sign of a coming crypto thaw. Certain stocks that are particularly exposed to crypto prices have seen a cautious uptick. 

As we approach the end of earnings season, this is a good moment to evaluate the recent performance and immediate prospects of three such stocks. 

Strategy: The DAT play

The godfather of DATs reported Q1 earnings on 5 May. Operating loss widened to $14.47bn from $5.92bn a year earlier, driven largely by an unrealised $14.46bn loss on digital assets, versus a total of $5.91bn held in the year-ago quarter.  

Notwithstanding this, revenue rose 11.9% year-on-year to $124.3m in Q1, while gross profit increased to $83.4m. 

Executive Chairman Michael Saylor (pictured) flagged on the earnings call that the firm was ready to sell some of its BTC holdings for the first time. This was not, however, an admission that the strategy was faltering, but rather a complex manoeuvre to offset a tax bill associated with the dip in BTC’s price, as Bitcoin Magazinedetailed. 

CEO Phong Le explained the logic on the earnings call. “I believe in math over ideology,” he said. “At the point where selling bitcoin versus selling equity to pay a dividend is better for our bitcoin-per-share, and for our common shareholders, we will do it.” 

Investors seemingly found this convincing. Post-earnings, MSTR stock continued on its rise out of the depths of the crypto winter doldrums. As of 12 May it is up 21.37% year-to-date, although it is down 55.67% over the last 12 months. 

Then, earlier this week, Strategy disclosed it had bought 535 BTC for $43m at an average price of $80,340 per coin. The company now holds 818,869 BTC acquired for roughly $61.9bn at an average cost of $75,540, with bitcoin yield reaching 9.4% year-to-date in 2026.

In short, this does not look like a company that has lost faith in its mission.  

Strive: The crypto platform play

Strive [ASST] was an asset manager founded by Vivek Ramaswamy in 2022, and numbered JD Vance and Peter Thiel among its investors. In mid-2025 its CEO, Matt Cole, began to talk about turning the firm into “the Berkshire Hathaway [BRK-B] of Bitcoin Treasury companies”. Strive duly merged with Nasdaq-listed Asset Entities to create a publicly traded DAT, and later acquired medical-device-maker-turned-DAT Semler Scientific in a $1.3bn all-stock deal.

While it referenced the Strategy strategy, Strive strove to differentiate itself. For instance, unlike Strategy, which primarily relied on convertible debt and equity issuance to accumulate BTC, Strive positioned itself as a broader DAT platform built around perpetual preferred equity, structured credit products and M&A-driven BTC accumulation. Management also framed the company less as a software business turned BTC proxy and more as a purpose-built financial vehicle designed to maximise BTC-per-share growth from inception.

Strive is expected to report its Q1 2026 earnings on 22 May, with analysts estimating earnings will grow by 72.2% and revenue by 34.9% y/y, according to Simply Wall Street. 

ASST stock is down a dismal 89.49% over the last 12 months, but up 15.65% year-to-date.

Bitmine: The ETH play

Other companies applied the Strategy playbook to different cryptocurrencies. Bitmine [BMNR], focused on ethereum [ETH], is a prominent example. 

Formerly a BTC miner, under chairman Tom Lee the company set a public target described as the “alchemy of 5%” – aiming to ultimately control around 5% of all ETH in existence.

Compared with BTC DATs, ETH adds staking yield, creating something resembling an income stream, and ties exposure more directly to network activity like DeFi, stablecoins and tokenisation. The model is more about financial engineering and balance-sheet compounding than pure store-of-value accumulation. Bitmine’s bet is that ETH becomes a dominant settlement layer, where staking yields and scarcity justify aggressive accumulation.

The firm frames its strategy as aligned with structural demand tailwinds from institutional tokenisation and the growing use of public blockchains by agentic artificial intelligence systems.

The firm reported Q1 results back in April, logging a significant net loss of $3.82bn, driven by $3.78bn in unrealised losses on its massive ETH treasury due to price volatility. Despite the loss, quarterly revenue reached $11.04m, with $10.2m generated from staking 3.33m ETH.

As of 12 May, the firm holds more than 4.31% of the total ETH supply, which stands at roughly 120.7m coins. It says it is 86% of the way toward its “alchemy of 5%” target, achieved in just 11 months of accumulation.

It holds 4,712,917 staked ETH, valued at around $11.1bn at a reference price of $2,366 per ETH. Bitmine also completed its uplisting to the NYSE from the NYSE American, effective 9 April, 2026. 

BMNR stock is up 198.9% against its IPO in June 2025.

Three sides of the same coin: MSTR vs ASST vs BMNR

This is how the three stocks currently compare in terms of fundamentals. 

Source: Yahoo Finance

Conclusion 

The DAT trade is no longer a one-way momentum story. Strategy remains the archetype, showcasing capital markets access, BTC concentration and a willingness to flex balance sheet mechanics around volatility. Strive represents the experimental second wave, still digesting aggressive M&A and struggling to convince investors its “platform DAT” model can outperform simple spot exposure. Bitmine, meanwhile, sits somewhere between mining legacy and ETH financialisation, leaning on staking yield and tokenisation narratives to justify scale accumulation.

If crypto is entering a springtime rather than a new supercycle, dispersion will matter more than direction. In that environment, only the most structurally funded DATs are likely to compound.

CMC Aureon’s proprietary theme relevance system maps the world’s biggest investing megatrends. For in-depth analyses of stocks with high growth potential, subscribe to CMC Aureon Foresight.