In 2026, Saylor’s Strategy Still Holds a Significant Lead
Strategy, the company Michael Saylor built into the world’s largest corporate bitcoin holder, still sits alone at the top with 843,775 $BTC on its balance sheet. That is roughly $58 billion at current prices, spread across a business that now issues debt and equity almost entirely to fund more bitcoin purchases.
But the size of a company’s bitcoin stack and the direction of its stock price have split into two very different stories in 2026. Miners are rallying. Treasury companies are getting punished.
The top ten list below ranks the ten largest corporate bitcoin holders as of July 25, 2026, using data compiled from bitcointreasuries.net.
The Top 10 Corporate Bitcoin Holders
- Strategy (MSTR): 843,775 $BTC
- Twenty One Capital (XXI): 43,514 $BTC
- Metaplanet (MPJPY): 43,000 $BTC
- Mara Holdings (MARA): 36,303 $BTC
- Bullish (BLSH): 24,300 $BTC
- Strive (ASST): 19,921 $BTC
- SpaceX (SPCX): 18,712 $BTC
- Coinbase Global (COIN): 16,492 $BTC
- Riot Platforms (RIOT): 15,680 $BTC
- Cleanspark (CLSK): 13,924 $BTC
Strategy’s lead is not close. It is approximately 843,775 $BTC, which works out to more than 19 times what second-place Twenty One Capital holds. Saylor started buying bitcoin for the former Microstrategy in 2020, back when the idea of a Nasdaq-listed software company converting its treasury into bitcoin sounded fringe.
Five years later, that decision defines the company. Strategy now trades largely as a leveraged bet on bitcoin’s price, which explains why the stock has fallen 40% in 2026 even as its bitcoin holdings kept growing. Strategy abandoned its long-held “never sell” approach this year, something that stood out immediately after years of insisting every bitcoin purchase was effectively permanent.
The company first sold 32 $BTC in late May to help fund preferred stock dividend payments, its first net bitcoin sale in years. A few weeks later, between late June and early July, it sold another 3,588 $BTC for roughly $216 million to meet stock-related obligations and add cash to its balance sheet. Even after those transactions, Strategy has remained the world’s largest corporate bitcoin holder by a wide margin, showing that the sales reflected capital management rather than a retreat from its long-term bitcoin strategy.
Miners Are Winning the Stock Market
Looking past the raw bitcoin totals, a clearer pattern shows up in the share prices. The companies that mine bitcoin are having a strong year. The companies that simply hold it as a treasury asset are not.
The reasons are straightforward. First, miners can accumulate bitcoin at a production cost that is often below the prevailing market price, giving them an advantage that most corporate buyers cannot match. Second, many publicly traded miners have spent the past few years building out artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, creating a second line of business that helps diversify revenue beyond bitcoin mining alone.
Riot Platforms, for instance, is up 73% year to date, the best performance among the top ten holders. Cleanspark has gained 39% as it builds out mining data centers and battery storage projects across North America. Mara Holdings is up 31% on the strength of its own mining and treasury strategy, holding 36,303 $BTC while continuing to expand its mining footprint.
Twenty One Capital (XXI) only launched in March 2025, but it moved quickly to become the second-largest corporate bitcoin holder. The Austin-based firm was backed by crypto interests, including Tether, and initially led by entrepreneur Jack Mallers, who departed the company last week. Its entire business model centers on giving stock market investors direct exposure to bitcoin’s price, without the software or mining operations that other companies on this list also run.
Metaplanet, the Tokyo-listed company that pivoted from hotel development to a bitcoin treasury strategy, is down 49% as of July 25, 2026. The company still holds 43,000 $BTC, the third largest position on this list, but its stock has moved almost entirely in step with bitcoin’s price swings. As of Friday’s close, Twenty One Capital has dropped 48% year-to-date despite holding 43,514 $BTC, the second largest reserve on the list.
Investors appear to be rewarding companies that produce bitcoin and offer AI infrastructure over companies that simply buy and hold $BTC, especially when those holding companies rely on issuing new shares or debt to keep growing their reserves. Mining companies have years of experience, and some control their own production costs. Treasury companies depend on capital markets staying open and willing to fund more purchases.
Two names in the middle of the list show how mixed this year has been. Bullish, the Cayman Islands-based exchange operator that went public through a SPAC deal in August 2025, holds 24,300 $BTC but has seen its stock fall 37% as crypto trading volumes slumped and the company reported losses tied to negative equity.
Strive, the Dallas-based asset manager built around a bitcoin treasury, holds 19,921 $BTC and is down a comparatively milder 24% since the start of the year. Both companies show that even within the treasury group, the size of the decline depends heavily on how each business funds its bitcoin purchases and how much debt sits underneath the strategy.
Coinbase and Riot Platforms sit next to each other on the holdings list but tell opposite stories on the stock chart. Coinbase, the San Francisco exchange founded by Brian Armstrong, holds 16,492 $BTC but has watched its stock fall 31% this year as trading volumes cooled across the industry. Riot Platforms holds slightly less bitcoin at 15,680 $BTC but has gained 83.4% because its core business is producing new coins rather than simply holding them on a balance sheet.
SpaceX Joins the List After a Record IPO
SpaceX’s position on this list looks a lot different from when it had its initial public offering (IPO). The company completed its IPO on June 12, 2026, pricing shares at $135 and raising roughly $85.7 billion in the largest IPO in history, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing. Shares began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX and opened at $150, and the stock briefly pushed SpaceX’s market capitalization above $2.6 trillion during a run to $225.64 on June 16. That rally did not hold.
Shares fell below the IPO price by mid-July and were trading at $115 by Friday’s close on July 24, roughly 15% below the offering price and 45% to 50% off the June peak. SpaceX disclosed in its IPO filing that it held 18,712 $BTC, worth about $1.45 billion at the time, a position that still ranks ahead of Coinbase, Riot Platforms and Cleanspark on the bitcoin holdings list even as the stock itself has cooled sharply since its debut.
A Tokyo Hotel Company Turned Bitcoin Treasury
Metaplanet’s story is one of the most distinctive entries on this list. The company was founded in 1999 and spent most of its history developing and operating hotels in Japan. It only began accumulating bitcoin in recent years, announcing plans to hold the asset long term on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. That pivot turned Metaplanet into the third-largest corporate bitcoin holder in the world, with 43,000 $BTC, even as its stock has struggled alongside bitcoin’s broader price swings in 2026. The company’s bitcoin treasury has reached a scale unmatched by any other Japanese public company.
How the Playbook Spread
Strategy’s approach did not stay unique for long. Once Saylor showed that a public company could raise capital specifically to buy bitcoin and watch its stock trade at a premium to those holdings, other companies followed. Some, like Metaplanet and Twenty One Capital, built entire business models around the same idea. Others, like the mining companies on this list, added bitcoin purchases on top of businesses that already produced the asset. That difference in starting point helps explain why the group has split so sharply into winners and losers this year, even though every company on the list is exposed to the same underlying bitcoin price.
What This Means Going Forward
The split between miners and treasury companies is likely to keep shaping how investors approach bitcoin-linked stocks for the rest of 2026. A company that mines its own bitcoin controls its production costs and can expand capacity when conditions favor it. A company that only buys bitcoin depends on capital markets staying open to it, and that access can tighten quickly when a stock price falls and dilution risk grows.
For now, the ten companies on this list collectively hold more bitcoin than most national governments. Their combined decisions on whether to keep buying, start selling, or shift strategy will continue to move both the crypto market and their own share prices well beyond July 2026. For everyday market observers watching bitcoin from the sidelines, these digital asset treasury (DAT) company stocks provide a window into how public companies manage large bitcoin treasuries and how the market responds to those strategies.
Whether that risk pays off will keep coming down to the same divide separating this list today, between companies that make bitcoin and companies that just buy it.
