Please note that VanEck has exposure to bitcoin.

Key Takeaways

• Power, not chips, is the binding constraint: NVDA, AMD, and AVGO are expected to need roughly 30GW of US capacity through 2027 against annual additions of 15 to 25GW, and only ~2% of the interconnection queue reached the grid in 2025.
• Miners own the scarce asset: Our re-underwritten base case implies ~83% average upside across our powered-land holdings, with the market still ascribing little value to uncontracted pipeline or the terminal value of signed leases.
• Metaplanet turns bitcoin buying into insider dilution: Its option pool reached 14.7% of fully diluted shares and officer exposure 8.2%, roughly 4x and 10x the peer average, making it the only name among the 10 largest DATs we band as “Bad.”

This month we step away from Bitcoin network fundamentals to tackle 2 issues in the bitcoin equity complex. The first is the miners converting to AI data centers, where the constraint is megawatts. The second is the digital asset treasury companies (DATs), where the problem is too many shares. Both come down to the same question for anyone trying to beat bitcoin through equities: what scarce assets does the company control, and how much of the value it creates actually reaches shareholders?

Miners: Power Is the Bottleneck, Not Chips

We re-underwrote US data center supply and demand from the ground up. NVDA, AMD, and AVGO need roughly 30 gigawatts (GW) of US power through 2027 while the grid can deliver 15 to 25GW a year, only ~2% of the interconnection queue was energized in 2025, and firm capacity is shrinking as coal retires faster than gas arrives. That puts the miners in possession of the scarce asset. We see more risk that NVDA misses estimates because its customers cannot get power than that the miners fail to lease their megawatts. Our re-underwritten base case implies ~83% average upside across our powered-land holdings.

Digital Asset Treasuries (DATs): Management Is Paying Itself With Your Dilution

We also screened the 10 largest DATs on 4 questions: how big the equity plan is versus fully diluted shares, how much sits with named officers, whether the pool grows without a stockholder vote, and whether the largest award has a performance hurdle. 9 of the 10 pass, with 6 earning good marks and 3 garnering weaker grades. The 10^th, Metaplanet, fails all 4 tests. Its option pool was pegged at 20% of fully diluted shares and climbed with every bitcoin purchase, and even after 2 rounds of cuts in August and September, its executive pay is still a multiple of every peer on every metric.

Both takeaways feed directly into how we invest. We like miners with energized power because we expect the power shortage to persist, and we remain underweight DATs because of leverage and because of the dilution that insider dealing and outsized executive rewards keep producing.

Bitcoin Miners Have the Megawatts: Power, Not Chips, Is the AI Bottleneck

Given the bullish commentary from leading AI names such as NVDA, AMD, and AVGO during the recent earnings cycle, we examined expected US data center capacity coming online over the next few years and found a likely shortfall in the ability to energize GPUs shipping in 2027. We expect 15 to 25GW of US data center capacity to come online annually over the next 2 years, with the lower end more likely in 2026. Over that same period, the combination of NVDA, AMD, and AVGO is likely to require approximately 30GW.

Our Three Takeaways: Power Scarcity, NVDA Risk, and Miner Upside

We reiterate our conviction in a powered land shortage: The binding constraint is not capital or demand but process throughput in securing power. Only ~2% of the interconnection queue reached commercial operation in 2025, median request to operation has stretched to 61 months from 22 in 2008, and net firm dispatchable capacity suitable for data centers contracts over 2026-2028 as coal retires faster than gas arrives. With interconnection queues shifting from first in first out to batch and cluster studies, the process is becoming more selective. This favors operators with energized sites and established utility and community relationships over those holding long-time queue positions. We see bitcoin miners uniquely positioned in that regard.

We see greater risk to NVDA missing estimates on a GW shortage than to miners failing to monetize their MWs: NVDA’s calendar 2027 data center revenue implies ~11GW of US capacity needed at ~$37B per GW, meaning that every 1GW its customers cannot energize represents ~$37B of revenue (~6% of total) that NVDA could potentially lose. A 3GW shortfall, plausible if additions land at the low end of our 15-25GW range, would imply an ~18% revenue drop. Natural offsets to this could be greater mix of sales to non-US regions, or specifically China.

The miners sit on the other end of this trade, already holding energized power with expansion opportunities that have been in the works for years. Their risk is leaving uncontracted megawatt (MW) value on the table, which companies like NVDA/AMD/AVGO are incentivized to avoid, not failing to monetize them.

Re-underwriting the thesis, we see ~83% average upside across our powered-land holdings: Using a mix of sum-of-the-parts (SOTP) and discounted cash flow (DCF) analyses, our base case implies roughly 83% average upside across our bitcoin miner basket. We believe the market continues to ascribe little to no value to 2 components: the uncontracted power pipeline, which this analysis shows to be highly valuable, and the terminal value of the leases themselves. Over time, we expect both to accrue value meaningfully to the companies and to shareholders. These figures are the results of a simulation based on our research, are for illustrative purposes only, and are not a projection of future performance; see Risk Considerations below.

Demand: NVDA, AMD, and AVGO alone are expected to demand ~30GW of power across 2026-2027 (~11GW in 2026 and nearly 20GW in 2027) based on revenue expectations for each: Starting with each company’s respective AI/data center revenue expectations for the next 2 years, we back into the implied power generation needs using management guided revenue-per-GW metrics where available, and sense-check this (for NVDA) with a bottoms-up approach based on expected average unit price by GPU mix and estimated power draw per unit. We find that NVDA will need ~20GW, AMD ~4-5GW, and AVGO ~6GW through 2027, together representing an estimated 60-100% of total US data center capacity expected to come online over the timeframe.

Top Providers Demand, Calendar Years 2026-27 (GW)

Source: Company reports, VanEck Research, as of 9/14/2026. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein. For illustrative purposes only. Not a projection of future results.

Supply: We estimate 15-25GW of US data center capacity coming online annually over the next 2 years: Based on an aggregate of third-party sources and our own estimates, US data center capacity of ~50GW at the end of 2025 is projected to grow towards ~80GW by the end of 2027, implying annual additions of ~15GW. This pace is consistent with Bernstein’s tracked active capacity growth of ~13GW (North America) over the last 12 months ended August 2026. We view this figure as more of a floor and see the ~70GW currently under construction in North America implying a possible ceiling of ~25GW in the US over the next 2 years, given the typical 18-24 month build cycles and the likelihood of delays.

Annual US Data Center Additions (GW)

Cumulative US Data Center capacity (GW)

Source: Goldman Sachs Research, Bernstein Research, FERC, EIA, Morgan Stanley Research, as of 9/14/2026. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein. For illustrative purposes only. Not a projection of future results.

Only ~2% of the queue was grid connected in 2025, underscoring how long the backlog could take to clear: Entering 2025 there were 2,290GW of generation in the US grid interconnection queue. Over the year just 53GW (~2%) was grid-connected while 756GW (~33%) was withdrawn, leaving a year-end 2025 queue of 2,061GW. This is consistent with long-term trends, with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) noting that only ~13% of capacity that entered the queue between 2000 and 2020 had reached operation by the end of 2025, while 75% was withdrawn. Additionally, 41% of capacity that executed interconnection agreements between 2000 and 2022 had withdrawn by the end of 2025.

The Queue Is Not a Pipeline

US Generation Interconnection Queue, Total Capacity (GW)

Source: VanEck Research, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, US Energy Information Administration, as of 9/14/2026. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein.

Elevated withdrawal rates are partially transitory, but likely to persist for now: A couple of reasons for the elevated number of withdrawals in the last 1-2 years include 1) phasing out of One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) tax credits that pulled forward cancellations of projects that would have relied on them, 2) queue closures and caps in regions such as MISO and NYISO, and 3) FERC reform that imposed higher at-risk deposits and escalating withdrawal penalties, forcing projects that had been sitting free in the queue to suddenly face real costs to stay. While some of these are one-time in nature, the reforms are designed to raise the withdrawal rate, as higher deposits and readiness requirements exist to push weak projects out faster. A cleaner queue should mean a higher rejection rate at the front and a higher completion rate at the back, but it remains to be seen whether this materializes.

Further, a significant portion of capacity added from the queue has been renewables, which is better suited as a complement for data center capacity, rather than a substitute: While solar, wind, and storage can support data centers, to date they have not proven reliable as a standalone power supply. A 2026 study from LUT University in Finland found that an off-grid renewable data center needs ~7x its baseload requirement in nameplate generation, in addition to backup power. This is because longer duration storage (>4 hours), which is needed to cover the hours when it’s dark or not windy, is not economical to build today. Battery costs scale directly with duration since the energy is stored within the cells themselves, and a battery sized for the overnight gap created by solar power sits idle most of the year. A behind-the-meter (BTM) gas turbine puts capital into the generation rather than in storing energy, which is why operators are opting to pair renewables with BTM turbines rather than adding more storage.

This issue is further exacerbated by ~40GW of coal and oil that is expected to roll off the grid/retire in the coming years. If we assume 14GW retires each year, this reduces the EIA’s expected 86GW of gross additions towards ~72GW. Given the mix coming onto the grid is primarily solar, wind, and storage while the mix coming off is coal and oil, net firm capacity (the kind data centers need) is contracting even as total capacity sets records. This makes existing energized sites the scarce assets, which is why operators with power already in place are executing leases at improving rates (converting a site that is already interconnected sidesteps a queue that takes 61 months to clear). Until the gas capacity now entering the queue gets connected, that scarcity should persist.

Record Additions, Shrinking Firmness

The Grid Is Adding Energy, Not Dispatchable Capacity

Source: VanEck Research, US Energy Information Administration, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, as of 9/14/2026. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein. For illustrative purposes only. Not a projection of future results.

Hyperscalers’ own endeavors highlight the inability of renewables to power data centers: Google has been among the most determined corporate buyers of clean power on earth, signing more than 240 agreements for ~35GW of clean energy since 2010. That said, in its 2026 Environmental Report the company states plainly that even companies meeting a 100% annual match “continue to rely on power generated by fossil fuels during times when, or in places where, carbon-free generation isn’t available.” Its most advanced hourly-matching arrangement, a 500MW portfolio of wind, solar, hydro, and storage supplying its Virginia campus, was structured to deliver just 90% of hours carbon-free, well short of the ~99.99% availability a data center requires.

Hourly Carbon-Free Energy (CFE) Performance at a Hypothetical Site

Source: Google Environmental Report 2026, as of 9/14/2026. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein. For illustrative purposes only. Not a projection of future results.

Serving 1GW of Flat Load With 4GW of Solar

Typical Summer Day, 25% Capacity Factor

Source: VanEck Research, as of 9/14/2026. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein. For illustrative purposes only. Not a projection of future results.

Construction progress suggests delays to planned operation dates, with potential supply/demand balance unlikely until 2030: According to Currence, only ~50% of the announced data center capacity to be operational in 2026 is under construction, while significantly less is under construction for 2027-2028. Notably, a much higher portion of the 11.8GW of currently planned power for 2030 is underway, suggesting this is when we could start to see some supply/demand balance. Further, while active capacity under construction in North America has surpassed 70GW, stranded capacity (delayed + canceled + not approved / withdrawn) continues to increase as well. Considering 18-24 month build times and a multi-year phased build for many of these sites, it’s clear that much of the recently started construction will not reach operation until beyond 2028.

US Data Center Pipeline, by Operational Date (GW)

Source: Currence AI, as of 9/14/2026. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein. For illustrative purposes only. Not a projection of future results.

Capacity Under Construction vs. Stranded, Monthly (GW)

Source: Bernstein Research, VanEck Research, as of 9/14/2026. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein.

Power for data centers shifting from PJM to ERCOT/MISO, while queues shift from renewables to gas: Today, PJM holds the largest installed data center fleet but a much smaller queue than other regions, as ERCOT, MISO, and Western states continue to take share. We also expect natural gas and other data center-capable power to become more prevalent in the coming years, as the shift towards batch and cluster studies from “first in first out” gives them a better case to be approved than in the past with firm AI commitments backing them. Notably, active gas capacity in the queue rose 86% to 253GW in 2025, while solar fell 19%, storage 16%, and wind 19%.

Queued gas cannot arrive on time, and that constraint is where we see our INNIO Group (INIO) and Doncasters (DPC) exposure paying off: Only ~18% of active gas capacity in US interconnection queues holds a draft or executed agreement (vs >30% for solar and wind), and turbine lead times run 3-5 years with the major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) effectively sold out through 2028. Developers are responding by going behind the meter, with >100GW of on-site natural gas generation now announced in the US.

INIO sits directly in this order flow with equipment order backlog of $6.6B (up from $3.6B exiting 2025) led by increasing behind-the-meter data center demand.

DPC approaches the same shortage from the other side, manufacturing precision superalloy castings that go into industrial gas turbines, supplying the OEMs whose capacity is sold out for years. DPC carries a near $1B order backlog, with ~70% of that revenue under long-term agreements. We view it as owning the bottleneck rather than competing against it.

Interconnection Queue and Data Center Share by Region

Source: VanEck Research, FERC, EIA, as of 9/14/2026. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein.

Top States, Active Capacity (July 2026)

Source: VanEck Research, FERC, EIA, as of 9/14/2026. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein.

Digital Asset Treasury Dilution: How Executive Pay Reaches Your Shares

Exorbitant executive compensation has been one of the most consistent controversies in crypto, both onchain and offchain. We regularly find oversized team token allocations at crypto projects, and we have found unjustifiably high executive pay at some bitcoin miners. Digital asset treasury companies (DATs) were already viewed skeptically by many investors because of their highly dilutive private investment in public equity (PIPE) structures, so we were not surprised to find executive compensation problems at some of them as well.

To be clear, we agree that exceptional managerial performance should be rewarded with exceptional pay. We draw the line at pay packages that are enormous regardless of performance. To sort the field, we screened the 10 largest DATs by market cap on 4 questions: how large is the equity plan relative to fully diluted (FD) shares, how much of it sits with named officers, whether the pool can grow automatically without a stockholder vote, and whether the largest award carries a performance test and was put to stockholders. On that basis we band each company into Good, Acceptable, or Bad.

Looking at the table of our ratings, 6 of the 10 are run justifiably, 3 have decent structure with weaker checks, and one, Metaplanet, fails on every dimension at once. This judgment stands even after Metaplanet recently (August 18 and September 11) adjusted its executive compensation regime.

Top 10 Digital Asset Treasuries (DATs) by Market Cap: Executive Equity Compensation at a Glance

Capital B swapped for Bit Digital.

Source: SEC filings, company disclosures, as of 9/14/2026. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein.

The DATs are marked “Good” because their executive compensation practices are characterized by small, fixed pools that are put to a stockholder vote. Additionally, some further distinguish themselves, like BitMine’s package, because they strongly align executive compensation with shareholder interests. Strategy (MSTR), BitMine (BMNR), Hyperliquid Strategies (PURR), Sharplink (SBET), Tron (TRON), and Bit Digital (BTBT) share 3 traits. First, the plan pools are modest, ranging from 0.6% of FD at Tron to 5.0% at Sharplink, and officer exposure is 1.0% of FD or less at every one of them. Second, none carries an evergreen or auto-growth provision that would let officers’ award size rise automatically with the share count. Each reserve is fixed and any increase has to go back to stockholders for a vote. Third, each plan was approved by a stockholder vote, and the 2 largest individual awards in the group were both tested against performance and voted on separately.

The Good: Fixed Pools, Performance Hurdles, Shareholder Votes

Strategy’s 2023 Equity Plan is the best example of a well-designed compensation structure with a fixed maximum pool of 8.35 million shares, 2.0% of a 424 million share FD base, with no evergreen clause. Strategy’s executive equity is small and concentrated, with the 4 officers together holding about 0.5% of fully diluted shares in awards, most of it the CEO’s legacy options, vesting either ratably over 4 years or on a 3-year relative total shareholder return (TSR) test that pays zero to double the target. In June 2026, it paid 200% to officers, the maximum, due to strong performance at Strategy. Plan increases go to the shareholders and the founder takes no equity at all.

BitMine offers more generous compensation than Strategy, but it is also structured well. The total share pool of BitMine is 19.15 million (3.2% of FD). Meanwhile, officer awards are at 1.0% of FD, with a single large award to Tom Lee that is 75% performance-based. These performance incentives trigger at $125 and $250 stock prices or $25B and $50B market caps with other rewards that occur after the purchase of 4% to 5% share of ETH supply. The remaining restricted stock units (RSUs) time-vest only. The package was put to a binding vote and received 76% support, and the omnibus plan passed with 92%. Changes to the compensation structure must go through similar shareholder votes.

Another great example of a sound officer incentive plan is Sharplink which pairs 3-year time-vesting RSUs with performance stock units (PSUs) that cliff-vest in July 2028 based upon meeting performance goals. This structure was also voted upon by shareholders. Sharplink’s only blemish is a 3 million share inducement pool that has not been voted on. Meanwhile, Hyperliquid Strategies rounds out the well-structured group with a fixed 2.8% maximum pool and officer exposure of just 0.7% of FD. Its recurring CEO grants are capped in dollars at $2M to $3M a year rather than in shares, so the award does not scale with dilution, though the 2025 plan was approved at the SPAC vote and its first proxy is still pending.

The final 2 names classified as “Good” do not have optimal designs but keep the CEO bonuses relatively low as a percentage of diluted shares. Tron’s pool is just 0.6% of FD and was exhausted in December 2025, with the annual restricted stock award capped at salary by contract, but there is no performance test and the controller holds 88.5% of the vote. Therefore, stockholder approval is a formality because of the concentrated ownership structure. Bit Digital shows zero officer exposure and a voted 15 million share 2026 plan (96.9% support), but the CEO and CFO were each granted about 1.1 million RSUs in 2025 that vested immediately. It has also issued serial fixed plans totaling 35.4 million shares since 2021, and insiders hold “super-voting” preference shares which together vote like ~100 million ordinary shares against ~349 million outstanding.

The Acceptable: Reasonable Size, Weaker Checks

We classify companies with “Acceptable” compensation structure as those that have reasonably good structure but lack significant checks. Twenty One Capital (XXI), Strive (ASST), and Forward Industries (FWDI) each have fixed reserves with no evergreen, but each falls short on either the performance test or the vote. Twenty One has the highest officer exposure of the 3 at 2.3% of FD and a 1.9% single-officer position; half of Jack Mallers’s award was tied to BTC-accumulation hurdles and has been forfeited, the replacement CEO award has not yet been sized, and the plan was approved by a pre-listing sole holder with Tether controlling the vote.

Strive has the best-designed incentive in the band, PSUs paying 0% to 200% on TSR against bitcoin and the Russell 3000 Index, but its $17M CEO grant time-vests over 5 years with no performance condition, and the 2026 plan was ratified by insider written consent as a controlled company rather than by a public vote. Forward Industries’ officer exposure is a negligible 0.1% of FD and it did put its plan increase and a triennial say-on-pay to a vote in March 2026. However, the pool is 8.4% of FD, the second largest in the group, its legacy options at $18.50 (shares closed at $5.79 on 9/14) are far out of the money, and the RSUs granted in 2026 carry no performance test. The common thread throughout the group is that the package size is defensible but the accountability is thin. Either insiders control the vote or the largest award pays out for showing up.

The Bad: Metaplanet’s 14.7% Option Pool

Finally, we rank Metaplanet (MTPLF) as the only company among the top 10 DATs we classify as “Bad” on executive compensation practices and it falls well short of “Acceptable.” Its plan pool is 14.7% of FD, with officer exposure at 8.2% while the largest single officer holds 3.8%. These figures each represent a multiple of the next-worst name on every metric. Most importantly, the pool did not balloon to its size by committee decision. It got there through an unchanged, floating clause that reset the stock grant to 20% of fully diluted shares every time the company issued stock to buy bitcoin.

This was due to Metaplanet’s legacy as a former struggling hotel operator that created a reward structure to turn around the company. A retention plan approved by shareholders in 2023 at 46 million shares was built to grow with the share count to ensure officer compensation was not affected by dilution. Even after Metaplanet evolved into a DAT, its executive compensation scheme was never re-aligned. As a result, every purchase of bitcoin funded by equity was also a pay raise for its officers as the awards were reset upward each time Metaplanet issued stock. By mid-2026 the pool had swelled to 319.5 million potential shares, or about 20% of the company on a fully diluted basis.

Bowing to immense shareholder pressure, the board has acted twice in the past month but we believe its actions still fall well short of the mark. On August 18, 2026 Metaplanet’s board stopped the automatic growth by repealing the evergreen dilution clause but locked the pool at its enlarged size. On September 11 the board went further, rolling the conversion ratio back to where it stood before the September 2025 share offering. This effectively cut the pool 41% to 188.2 million shares. However, because 82.8 million shares had already been issued to insiders at the old ratio, the potential new shares fell by more than half, to 105.4 million, or roughly 7% of the company.

The scale of the gap between Metaplanet and the other 9 DATs in our screen becomes most clear when viewed on the basis of multiples. On the 3 size metrics from the table below, Metaplanet runs at roughly 4x the peer average on pool size, 10x on officer exposure, and 6x on the largest single officer position.

Metaplanet vs. the Other 9 Digital Asset Treasuries: How Many Times the Peer Level

Peer average and next-worst peer computed across the 9 other DATs in the table above.

Source: SEC filings, company disclosures, VanEck Research, as of 9/14/2026. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein.

The practices for actually awarding the shares differ as much as the numbers because there are no performance constraints on pay. Strategy, BitMine, and Strive all disclose per-officer grants, strikes, and vesting in SEC filings, tie the bulk of large awards to performance hurdles, cap plan size in a stockholder-approved document, and provide grant-timing disclosure under Item 402(x). Metaplanet’s rights carry no performance condition beyond continued service, the JPY 10 strike is a legacy price set before the pivot, the pool size was formula-driven rather than committee-driven, and per-officer disclosure arrived only after shareholder pressure in September 2026. Even DATs outside our top 10 screen with questionable dilution potential (TON Strategy, Nakamoto, ProCap, Empery) either capped their plans after the fact, tied their largest awards to price hurdles ($15 to $50 for ProCap, $10 to $30 VWAP for Empery), or put the plan to a vote. Metaplanet did none of these until the pool had already encompassed 20% of the company.

These 4 changes would move Metaplanet off the “Bad” band:

1. Cancel the roughly 273 million shares added by the adjustment clause.
2. Replace the remaining rights with a stockholder-approved plan sized in the low single digits of FD.
3. Tie compensation to a shareholder-aligned key performance indicator (KPI) such as bitcoin per FD share.
4. Adopt a written grant-timing policy.

Realistically, unless past grants are clawed back, a lot of damage has already been done to Metaplanet. We find it hard to believe that Metaplanet’s investors, had the vast majority understood the scale, would ever have approved the substantial dilution of their shares to buy bitcoin. Effectively, until the cuts to plan, Metaplanet passed only 80% of the bitcoin it bought through to shareholders, with management dilution absorbing the other 20%.

Our conclusion on DATs is the one that runs through all of our work on the sector: we are underweight DATs and prefer to take our digital-asset exposure through ETFs, which avoids the “surprises” and unnecessary volatility that come from leverage, related-party transactions, and insider compensation and selling.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are bitcoin miners pivoting to AI data centers?

Because the binding constraint on AI compute is power, not chips. NVDA, AMD, and AVGO are expected to need roughly 30GW of US capacity through 2027 while annual US additions run 15 to 25GW, and only ~2% of the interconnection queue reached commercial operation in 2025. Miners already hold energized sites and utility relationships, which makes their megawatts the scarce asset in that trade.

What is a digital asset treasury company (DAT)?

A DAT is a public company whose primary strategy is holding digital assets such as bitcoin or ether on its balance sheet, typically funded by issuing equity or convertible debt. Because the model depends on repeated share issuance, dilution terms and insider compensation matter as much as the assets held. Across the 10 largest DATs by market cap, equity plan pools range from 0.6% to 14.7% of fully diluted shares.

What is an evergreen provision in an executive equity plan?

An evergreen, or auto-growth, provision lets a plan’s share reserve increase automatically as the share count grows, without a new stockholder vote. Metaplanet’s version reset its option pool to 20% of fully diluted shares each time the company issued stock, so every equity-funded bitcoin purchase also enlarged management’s award. Its board repealed the clause on August 18, 2026 and rolled the conversion ratio back on September 11, cutting the pool 41% to 188.2 million shares.

To receive more Digital Assets insights, sign up in our subscription center.