In 2026, Saylor’s strategy still holds a significant lead
Strategy, the company Michael Saylor built to become the world’s largest bitcoin holder, still holds the top spot with 843,775 $BTC on its balance sheet. That’s about $58 billion at current prices, split between a company that now issues almost entirely debt and equity 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 together. Treasury companies are punished.
The top ten list below ranks the ten largest corporate bitcoin holders as of July 25, 2026, using data compiled at bitcointreasuries.net.
Top 10 Corporate Bitcoin Holders
- Strategy (MSTR): 843,775 $BTC
- Twenty-one capitals (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
- EspaceX (SPCX): 18,712 $BTC
- Global Coinbase (COIN): 16,492 $BTC
- Anti-riot platforms (RIOT): 15,680 $BTC
- Cleanspark (CLSK): 13,924 $BTC
The advance of the strategy is not closed. This is approximately 843,775 $BTCwhich is more than 19 times what second-place Twenty One Capital holds. Saylor started buying Bitcoin for the now-defunct Microstrategy in 2020, back when the idea of a Nasdaq-listed software company converting its treasury into Bitcoin seemed fringe.
Five years later, this decision defines the company. The strategy now trades largely as a leveraged bet on the price of bitcoin, which explains why the stock fell 40% in 2026 even as its bitcoin holdings continued to grow. This year, Strategy abandoned its long-standing “never sell” approach, which immediately stood out after years of insisting that every Bitcoin purchase was indeed permanent.
The company initially 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, an additional 3,588 copies were sold. $BTC for approximately $216 million to meet equity-related obligations and add cash to its balance sheet. Even after these transactions, the strategy remained by far the largest Bitcoin holding company in the world, showing that the sales reflected capital management rather than a retreat from its long-term Bitcoin strategy.
Miners are winning the stock market
Beyond the raw Bitcoin totals, a clearer trend appears in stock prices. Bitcoin mining companies are having a good year. Companies that simply hold it as a cash asset are not.
The reasons are simple. First, miners can accumulate bitcoins at a production cost that is often lower than the prevailing market price, giving them an advantage that most professional buyers cannot match. Second, many publicly traded miners have spent recent years developing artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, creating a second line of business that helps diversify their revenue beyond just bitcoin mining.
Riot Platforms, for example, is up 73% year to date, the best performance among the top ten holders. Cleanspark gained 39% as it built mining data centers and battery storage projects across North America. Mara Holdings is up 31% on 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 quickly grew to become the second largest corporate bitcoin holder. The Austin-based company was backed by crypto interests including Tether, and initially led by entrepreneur Jack Mallers, who left the company last week. Its entire business model aims to give stock investors direct exposure to the price of bitcoin, without the software or mining operations that other companies on this list also manage.
Metaplanet, the Tokyo-listed company that pivoted from hotel development to a Bitcoin cash strategy, is down 49% as of July 25, 2026. The company still holds 43,000 shares. $BTCthe third largest position on this list, but its stock has moved almost entirely in sync with Bitcoin’s price fluctuations. As of Friday’s close, Twenty One Capital is down 48% year to date despite holding 43,514 shares. $BTCthe second largest reserve on the list.
Investors appear to reward companies that produce bitcoin and offer AI infrastructure over companies that just buy and hold. $BTCparticularly when these holding companies rely on issuing new shares or debt to keep their reserves growing. Mining companies have years of experience and some control their own production costs. Treasury companies depend on capital markets remaining open and willing to fund more purchases.
Two names in the middle of the list show just how mixed this year has been. Bullish, the Cayman Islands-based exchange operator that went public via a SPAC deal in August 2025, holds 24,300 $BTC but saw its shares fall 37% as crypto trading volumes fell and the company reported losses related to negative equity.
Strive, the Dallas-based asset manager built around a Bitcoin hoard, holds 19,921. $BTC and is down a comparatively gentler 24% year to date. Both companies show that even within the Treasury group, the extent of the decline depends heavily on how each company finances its bitcoin purchases and the amount of debt underlying the strategy.
Coinbase and Riot Platforms sit side by side on the stock list, but tell opposite stories on the stock chart. Coinbase, the San Francisco exchange founded by Brian Armstrong, holds 16,492 $BTC but has seen its shares fall 31% this year as trading volumes have cooled across the sector. Riot Platforms holds slightly fewer bitcoins at 15,680 $BTC but gained 83.4% because its core business is producing new coins rather than just holding them on a balance sheet.
SpaceX joins the list after record IPO
SpaceX’s position on this list is very different from when it launched on the stock market (IPO). The company completed its IPO on June 12, 2026, pricing its shares at $135 and raising approximately $85.7 billion in the largest IPO in history, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s listing in 2019. The shares began trading on Nasdaq under the symbol 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. This rally did not hold.
Shares fell below the IPO price in mid-July and were trading at $115 as of the close on Friday, July 24, about 15% below the offering price and 45-50% below the June high. SpaceX revealed in its IPO filing that it held $18,712 $BTCworth around $1.45 billion at the time, a position that still ranks ahead of Coinbase, Riot Platforms and Cleanspark on the list of bitcoin holdings, even though the stock itself has cooled sharply since its debut.
A Tokyo hotel company turned into a Bitcoin treasure
The Metaplanet story is one of the most distinctive entries on this list. The company was founded in 1999 and has spent most of its history developing and operating hotels in Japan. Only in recent years has it started accumulating bitcoin, announcing its intention to hold the asset long-term on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. This pivot made Metaplanet the third largest corporate bitcoin holder in the world, with 43,000 $BTCalthough its stock has struggled alongside broader Bitcoin price swings in 2026. The company’s Bitcoin hoard has grown to a scale unmatched by any other Japanese public company.
How the Playbook Spread
The strategic approach did not remain unique for long. Once Saylor showed that a public company could raise capital specifically to buy bitcoin and monitor its shares at a price higher than those holdings, other companies followed. Some, like Metaplanet and Twenty One Capital, have built entire business models around the same idea. Others, like the mining companies on this list, added bitcoin purchases to companies that were already producing the asset. This difference in starting point helps explain why the group has split so sharply into winners and losers this year, even though all companies on the list are exposed to the same underlying price of Bitcoin.
What this means for the future
The divide between miners and treasury companies will likely continue to shape how investors approach bitcoin-related stocks for the remainder of 2026. A company that mines its own bitcoin controls its production costs and can increase its capacity when conditions favor it. A company that only buys bitcoin depends on open capital markets, and that access can tighten quickly when a stock price falls and the risk of dilution increases.
As of now, the ten companies on this list collectively hold more bitcoin than most national governments. Their combined decisions on whether to continue buying, start selling, or change strategies will continue to move both the crypto market and their own stock prices well beyond July 2026. For daily market watchers who watch Bitcoin from the sidelines, these actions of digital asset treasuries (DAT) companies offer a window into how public companies are managing Bitcoin’s big treasuries and how the market is reacting to these strategies.
Whether that risk pays off will still depend on the same divide that separates this list today, between companies that make Bitcoin and those that just buy it.