When Bitcoin Treasuries Turn Red: It’s Not Chaos, It’s Accounting

Paper losses are just the scoreboard doing its job

So Bitcoin sits near $78.5k and corporate Bitcoin piles look ugly on paper. Relax — that’s the whole point of running crypto as a treasury line item. You stick a hyper-volatile asset on the balance sheet and then report it every quarter. When price dips, the headline number goes red. It’s dramatic, but not revelatory.

What that red number doesn’t tell you is the financing story behind the scenes. Some firms bought early and have comfortable cost bases; others piled in later and now show big unrealized losses. Public trackers list stacks like 24,300 BTC for Bullish, 5,843 BTC for American Bitcoin Corp and 53,250 BTC for Marathon, but without disclosed average prices you can only estimate how raw the paper hit looks.

For companies that do publish cost-per-coin, the picture can be even more vivid. A firm sitting on 35,102 BTC with an average cost north of $107k will understandably look like it’s in a tough spot at $78k. Meanwhile, folks that bought cheap ages ago (you know who you are: Tesla, Coinbase) can sit back and let the storm blow over without anyone yelling “strategy failed!”

The real risk isn’t the red number — it’s the funding stack

Here’s the part people glaze over: running Bitcoin as a treasury is really a financing play with a Bitcoin wrapper. You can carry massive paper losses forever if you have time, cash flow, and no looming bills. The moment you need to raise money or service debt and markets are tight, that pleasant red becomes an operational headache.

Think of it like a factory that bought a mountain of coins and pays for it with ongoing capital raises. If the stock falls faster than Bitcoin, each new share you sell buys you less BTC. If markets sour, raising fresh cash gets expensive or impossible. That’s when the company might be forced to sell into weakness — not because of accounting, but because of timing.

Miners face the same math but in miner-speak: instead of buying BTC, they produce it, yet they still must cover operating costs. A miner with 53,250 BTC that also made direct market buys last year still has to manage cash flow and timing risk; mining revenue helps, but it’s not a free pass.

And there’s behavioral divergence, too. Some firms keep buying into dips — doubling down even while the scoreboard is red — because their investors expect the “machine” to keep running. Others pause purchases to preserve liquidity and avoid getting squeezed. Neither is objectively wrong; they just chose different risk budgets.

Bottom line: paper losses are noisy and scary-looking, but they’re mostly optics. The true test is whether a company can fund itself through the downcycle without being forced to sell. If it can, the red number is an annoyance. If it can’t, that’s when the strategy breaks.

So next time you see a headline shouting about “unrealized losses,” remember: it’s not the color on the spreadsheet that matters most — it’s the cash, the runway, and the plan for what happens when volatility sticks around.