oh no... we know how this ends, don't we?!

For a while last year, the US stock market would pay $2 for $1 of Bitcoin. It is hard to convey now how weird that time was. If you ran a tiny public company in mid-2025, the very best thing you could do was acquire $100 million of Bitcoin to add $200 million to your market capitalization. I[...] These companies were called “digital asset treasury companies,” or DATs. Everyone kind of knew this couldn’t last (it didn’t), so there was a mad rush to get these trades done before the party ended.

...and some --- let's be kind today and call them "intellectually diverse" (#1603339) -- people still think this model has merit and are desperately trying to make dilution-as-a-service be a respectable thing. bitch, please. #1530104 #1292636

In September 2025, a company called Datavault AI Inc. got into this game. Sort of. Datavault was a small public company, “a leader in AI-driven data visualization, valuation and monetization.”

This company, mid-sept 2025, was worth some $35m dollars... (116.7m shares outstanding, $0.30/share), but the most valuable thing they had was a public listing, or gullible management (or both):

On Sept. 25, it announced that it was selling 278.9 million shares, at a price of $0.5378 per share, to Scilex Holding Co., another public company focused on “acquiring, developing and commercializing non-opioid pain management products for the treatment of acute and chronic pain and neurodegenerative and cardiometabolic disease.”Scilex was paying the purchase price in Bitcoin, valued at $112,915.52 per Bitcoin, meaning that Datavault got about 1,309 Bitcoin for its stock. The stock promptly shot up, hitting a high of $3.118 in October, for a market capitalization of about $973 million.

Sure, 30x your market cap: easy.

Datavault did not, as far as I can tell, call itself a “Bitcoin treasury company” or DAT, and the announcement of the deal focused on its strategic goals, not the Bitcoin stuff.

Yeah, sure; don't mention the war.

"In round numbers, putting $150 million of Bitcoin into Datavault immediately added $900 million to its stock market value. Wild times!"

The wild times didn’t last, of course. The price of Bitcoin fell, DAT premiums collapsed, and by January Datavault had sold 491 Bitcoins back to Scilex for $40.5 million, about a 27% discount to the price four months earlier. (It moved on to other things, like a “dividend of Dream Bowl Meme Coin II tokens.“)

yeah, reasonable.

By the end of June, the date of its most recent financial statements, Datavault reported holding 837 Bitcoin, with a fair value of about $49 million. It reported total assets of about $277 million, with stockholders’ equity of about $246 million, so it is no longer especially a Bitcoin company. This Monday, Datavault’s stock closed at $0.1328 per share, for a market cap of about $126 million. (It has issued more stock, and currently has about 950 million shares outstanding.) Never mind.

Yeah, did I say the financialization-of-bitcoin trend was about diluting shareholders? I'm pretty sure I did... and I'm pretty sure Saylor and his choir bois forgot.... and oh yeah, this is veeeery obviously what was bound to happen!

In the original deal with Scilex, Datavault gave Scilex stock and Scilex gave Datavault 1,309 Bitcoins at Biconomy, a large crypto exchange. Datavault did not own those Bitcoins on the Bitcoin blockchain; it owned them in an account on the ledger of Biconomy. Over time, it sold some of them back to Scilex for cash, again in transfers on Biconomy (not the blockchain). And then, this June, Datavault tried to take its remaining Bitcoins out of Biconomy and, uh, has “been unable to complete the withdrawal.” Its accountants concluded that it never had the Bitcoins at all

Amazing. Don't keep your company's coin on a (shady??) exchange, I guess.

"it does kind of seem like, for a while last year, the US stock market would pay $2 for $0 worth of Bitcoin."

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