The same companies that rode the crypto boom by piling Bitcoin onto their balance sheets are now scrambling to rebrand as AI players.
It is not going great so far. Lixte Biotechnology Holdings Inc. saw its stock decline 33% following a June agreement to merge with a battery company. AlphaTON Capital Corp., a firm that owned various alternative coins, lost 33% after renaming itself Alpha Compute Corp. this past April.
Even the poster child for crypto treasuries is hurting. Strategy Inc., founded by Michael Saylor, pioneered the model back in 2020. Between late 2019 and a peak in November 2024, the company's shares surged over 3,000%. After that peak, Strategy Inc.'s stock plunged 81% and the company started offloading its Bitcoin reserves.
"Last year DATs could do no wrong, and this year they're dirty words," said Gregory Sichenzia, who serves as a founding partner at Sichenzia Ross Ference Carmel LLP. DAT stands for digital-asset treasury, a fancy name for companies that treat crypto like corporate cash.
The root cause is simple: crypto prices have cratered. Bitcoin fell 49% from its October 2025 peak through July 24, 2026. From the start of 2026 alone, it was down 27%. Ether did even worse, dropping 38% in the same period and 62% from its record in August 2025.
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That has crushed the logic of holding crypto on the balance sheet. When prices were soaring, these stocks traded at a premium. Now many trade below the net value of the crypto they own.
The median decline for US and Canadian digital-asset treasury stocks tracked by Bloomberg this year? 43%.
At the same time, the AI boom is pouring money into companies that build computing infrastructure. Alphabet, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic are spending heavily. SanDisk Corp., Dell, Intel, and Micron have become top performers in the S&P 500 in 2026. SanDisk's stock alone is up more than 500% this year.
So the pivot makes sense on paper. "There is a lot of interest in AI and people are going to pivot to where they think their business is going to succeed," said Toufic Adlouni, managing partner at law firm Renno & Co LLC.
Not every pivot has failed. CoreWeave Inc., a Bitcoin miner that shifted to cloud-computing services, is worth $40 billion as of July 2026. Its shares are up 80% since its IPO in March 2025.
Several firms turned their existing data centers toward artificial intelligence tasks, which helped their share prices bounce back. Even Allbirds, the shoemaker now called Smartbird Inc., pivoted to AI computing infrastructure.
But those success stories are the exceptions. Most of the recent pivots from crypto treasury firms have led to steep stock drops. Lawyers say more are coming. "I think DATs, as we've seen them, are probably done," said Daniel Forman, who is a partner at Lowenstein Sandler LLP.
The bottom line for your portfolio: The crypto treasury model relied on rising token prices to work. With Bitcoin and Ether well off their highs, holding digital assets on a company's books looks more like a liability than a strategy. A pivot to AI may be the new hype, but past pivots have punished shareholders.
Related: Amid Worsening Crypto Slump, Bitcoin Treasuries Lost $62 Billion
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