Treasury Bitcoin Liquidations Accelerate: Two Companies Announce Sales as Underwater Losses Mount

The Bitcoin treasury trade saw two companies make moves to sell their Bitcoin reserves this week as GD Culture Group approved the liquidation of its entire 7,500 BTC treasury ($500+ million) to fund share buybacks, while Empery Digital announced plans to "reduce its bitcoin holdings as needed" for repurchases and debt repayment. 

Both companies joined Sequans Communications, which sold 30% of its holdings (970 BTC) in November 2025 to cut convertible debt.

The pattern signals escalation from isolated sales to coordinated unwinding. 

When Sequans sold in November, it marked the first instance of a Bitcoin treasury company liquidating holdings under financial pressure. Now, two more companies announce sales in the same week — suggesting the selloff is accelerating as underwater losses mount and operational pressures intensify.

For one, GD Culture Group, the publicly traded artificial intelligence and livestream company approved the sale of its $500 million-strong Bitcoin stack. The company, however, provided no operational distress narrative, instead positioning the liquidation as a strategic capital allocation. 

Basically, management wants to buy back stock at discounts rather than holding volatile Bitcoin. The board decision suggests that management also concluded that shareholders are better served with cash returns than continued Bitcoin exposure. 

Then there’s Empery Digital. The firm announced on Wednesday that it will "reduce bitcoin holdings as needed to fund future share repurchases" following a public battle with 9.8% shareholder Tice P. Brown, who demanded full liquidation and management resignations. 

The company holds 4,081 BTC at a $117,000 cost basis — today worth $67,000 with 43% unrealized losses — while stock trades at just 57% of Bitcoin NAV. Management frames planned sales as part of a buyback strategy, but the economics reveal some daunting desperation: selling Bitcoin at 43% losses to repurchase stock trading at 43% discounts to already-depressed NAV.

The mathematics appear favorable on paper. If Empery sells 1,000 BTC for $67 million and uses proceeds to repurchase stock at 57% mNAV, it retires shares representing $117 million of NAV for just $67 million — creating an apparent 75% accretion for remaining shareholders. 

Indeed, this is the logic that management is attempting to present. Convert unrealized Bitcoin losses into realized shareholder value by exploiting the stock discount. 

But this logic collapses under scrutiny. 

First, selling Bitcoin at $67,000 converts unrealized losses (which could recover if Bitcoin rebounds) into permanent realized losses locked in forever. Second, the accretion only materializes if the mNAV discount persists after Bitcoin sales. Yet markets might compress the discount precisely because Empery reduced its volatile Bitcoin exposure, eliminating the supposed value creation. 

Third, management is effectively betting against their own treasury asset, declaring through actions that "Bitcoin won't recover to $117,000, but our stock will revalue upward.” That’s a backward thesis for a company built on its conviction in Bitcoin. 

Shareholders watching management sell Bitcoin at the bottom to buy back stock that also crashed are forced to face a circular logic: we bought an asset at $117,000, it fell to $67,000, so now we're selling it at maximum loss to repurchase our own equity that markets don't trust. The strategy converts one loss into another while calling it financial engineering.

GD Culture's 7,500 BTC, and Empery's unquantified planned sales represent modest volumes against Bitcoin’s daily $30+ billion trading volume. But both these companies are part of a larger pattern, and that’s that treasury companies purchased Bitcoin at over $100,000 during late 2024-early 2025's rally, suffered 40%+ losses when Bitcoin crashed to $60,000s, and now face pressure to liquidate from debt covenants, shareholder revolts, or boards questioning continued losses.

Dozens of other treasury companies also face identical pressures. Companies like DDC Enterprise (1,988 BTC at $85,756 cost, -22% loss) and Smarter Web Company (2,689 BTC at $112,865 cost, -41% loss) that trade at meager 0.3x to 0.5x mNAV face the same mathematics. If 20-30 similar companies liquidate 20% to 50% of holdings, the sector could dump 50,000 to 100,000 BTC over the coming quarters. 

Even though that’s modest against the overall supply, psychologically it’s significant.