on-chainDAT / docs

What is an on-chain DAT?

A DAT company is a publicly listed business that holds crypto and sells shares in itself. Tokenized DAT equity is that company's registered stock issued on-chain, with the shareholder rights intact. A protocol-native DAT is a smart contract that holds a treasury, with no shares and nobody obliged to the holder. All three are called DATs, and the third is spelled both “on-chain DAT” and “onchain DAT”. $LDAT is the third one, and only the third.

What does DAT stand for?

DAT stands for digital asset treasury. Past those three words there is no single agreed referent. The definition most commonly given by mainstream financial and legal sources is the corporate one. The Block defines it as: “Digital asset treasury companies (commonly known as DATs) are publicly traded firms which accumulate cryptoassets as a core part of their business strategy.” DefiLlama's Llama U guide is shorter: “a public company that buys and holds crypto tokens directly on its balance sheet.” Both describe a company. Neither describes a token, which is why a reader who arrives at a token called a DAT can end up confused.

The three categories at a glance

1. DAT company (DATCO)2. Tokenized DAT equity3. Protocol-native DAT
What you buyRegistered shares in a listed companyA token carrying the rights of a registered shareA token issued by a contract, carrying no claim on anyone
Who is obliged to youThe companyThe company, through its transfer agentNobody
DilutionNew shares can be issued (ATMs, PIPEs, convertibles)Same as category 1: the referent is the same stockNo shares exist, so no share issuance and no dilution
Where the treasury is reportedPeriodic filings, on the company's balance sheetPeriodic filings, on the company's balance sheetReadable on-chain at any block, by direct contract read
Who can change the rulesBoard and shareholders, inside securities lawBoard and shareholders, inside securities lawWhoever holds the contract's keys, until those keys are renounced

Category 1: the DAT company, or DATCO

A DAT company, also called a DATCO, is a publicly listed operating company whose core business is accumulating crypto on its own balance sheet. You buy shares. DLA Piper puts it this way: “Known as digital asset treasury (DAT) companies, these public companies, at the core of their revamped business model, pursue long-term accumulation of significant reserves of digital assets while employing sophisticated, yield-enhancing trading strategies.”

The canonical example is SEC filer CIK 0001050446, whose registered name is Strategy Inc and whose former name, MICROSTRATEGY INC, is recorded on EDGAR through 2025-08-11. What an investor holds is conventional securities: class A common stock on Nasdaq, plus four listed preferred series. The stated reason to hold the share rather than the coin is corporate: The Block notes DATs “typically utilize debt to fund new crypto purchases, meaning they offer a form of leveraged exposure,” and DLA Piper enumerates the machinery used to build them - at-the-market offerings, PIPEs, equity lines of credit, convertible notes, warrants, preferred equity, de-SPACs, reverse mergers and credit facilities.

The scale is corporate too. DLA Piper reports that fewer than ten companies held BTC in treasury in 2021, that more than 200 companies had adopted DAT strategies by September 2025 holding over $115 billion in digital assets, and that aggregate DAT market capitalisation was roughly $150 billion in September 2025 against $40 billion a year earlier.

If your question is about category 1, this page does not answer it. The Block, DLA Piper, DefiLlama and Cornerstone Research, all linked on this page, cover it directly. Category 1 is described here only so that it can be told apart from category 3.

Category 2: tokenized DAT equity

Tokenized DAT equity is a token that represents a claim on the equity of a category-1 company, issued onto a blockchain. The distinguishing feature is that the referent is registered stock and the obligor is the company itself.

The clearest example: on 2025-09-25 SharpLink Gaming announced it would tokenize its SEC-registered common stock on Ethereum through Superstate's Opening Bell platform, appointing Superstate as its Digital Transfer Agent. The Block reported that SharpLink plans to become the first public company to natively issue its common stock directly on the Ethereum blockchain. That is an announced intention as of that date; this page does not track whether it has completed.

Category 2 is worth separating from synthetic price exposure, and regulators separate it. The SEC's Division of Corporation Finance, in its statement on tokenized securities, defines a “linked security” as one “issued by the third party itself that provides synthetic exposure to a referenced security, but it is not an obligation of the issuer of the referenced security and confers no rights or benefits from the issuer of the referenced security.” A token that tracks a DAT company's share price is not the same instrument as a token that is that company's share.

Category 3: the protocol-native DAT

A protocol-native DAT is a smart contract that holds a treasury. There is no company behind the token, no share class, no filings, no board and no dilution. The treasury is the contract itself, and its holdings are readable on-chain at any block by anyone, without waiting for a quarter to close.

What you hold is a token issued by that contract. It is not a claim on a legal entity, nobody is obliged to redeem it for anything, and no counterparty owes you a distribution. Where a category-1 DAT raises money by selling shares and a category-2 token carries the rights of a share, a category-3 DAT typically funds its treasury out of its own trading activity. $LDAT is in this category. See DAT Types for how the funding rules differ between individual DATs.

One qualification on “no company.” The “no shares” half is exact and structural. The “no company” half is weaker: every live implementation checked for this page still has an owner key that has not been renounced - wBTCStrategy, PunkStrategy and Aerostrategy, all named below, along with $LDAT itself - and a development team behind it. The defensible statement is that there are no shares, no share issuance and no dilution, and that the treasury is the contract. It is not that nobody holds a key.

Synthetic price exposure: a fourth shape

Synthetic price exposure to a company's stock is a fourth shape that the three categories above do not cover, and the most prominent product described as an “onchain DAT” belongs to it rather than to any of the three.

On 2025-07-24 Injective published a post titled “Injective Pioneers the First Onchain Digital Asset Treasury with SBET”, stating: “Today, Injective is releasing onchain SBET, marking the first onchain digital asset treasury (DAT).” The reference asset is SharpLink Gaming's Nasdaq-listed common stock, ticker SBET, which is the equity of an ETH treasury company rather than ETH itself. The product is built on Injective's iAssets framework.

On mechanism, the most reliable source is Injective's own documentation, which describes iAssets as derivatives: they “exist purely as synthetic derivatives, powered by Injective's on-chain perpetual futures engine,” margin “is posted in USDT (or other supported stablecoins),” and “Positions are USDT-settled, not physically delivered.” On that description the instrument tracks a price rather than holding a treasury or carrying a share's rights, which is why it sits outside the three categories rather than inside category 2.

Two events are routinely conflated and should not be. Injective's SBET (2025-07-24) is a separate thing from SharpLink's own announcement (2025-09-25) that it would tokenize its registered stock via Superstate. Injective is not a party to the second, and the second is the category-2 example above.

Injective has publicly used “first onchain digital asset treasury (DAT)” for a product whose referent is corporate equity. That claim is different from anything on this page, it was made first, and this page neither contests it nor reuses the word “first.”

Why the term is contested

The business model is about five years older than the label. On 2020-08-11 MicroStrategy filed an 8-K whose press-release exhibit was headlined “MicroStrategy Adopts Bitcoin as Primary Treasury Reserve Asset”, disclosing the purchase of 21,454 bitcoins for an aggregate $250 million. Outlets generally treat that filing as the founding event of the category, and it never uses the words “digital asset treasury,” “DAT” or “DATCO” anywhere. It says “treasury reserve strategy.” The label was applied later, by the market.

A full-text search of SEC EDGAR for the exact phrase “digital asset treasury,” run on 2026-07-16, returns 0 matching filings for 2020, 22 for 2021, 11 for 2022, 2 for 2023, 4 for 2024, 1,202 for 2025 and 973 for 2026 through 2026-07-16. Within 2025 the monthly curve steps up across July to September. The pre-2025 hits were not inspected for whether they carry the modern sense of the phrase. Cornerstone Research reaches the same conclusion independently: “As evidenced by the mention of ‘Digital Asset Treasury’ in 8-K filings, the rise of DATs began to accelerate notably in mid-2025.” So the model dates to 2020 and the vocabulary to mid-2025.

Vocabulary that young has not settled. No published source identifies who coined “DAT” or “DATCO” - outlets generally credit Michael Saylor with the model and nobody with the acronym. An unowned acronym attached to a fast-moving subject is the condition under which three groups start using one word for three things.

Does mNAV apply to a protocol-native DAT?

mNAV compares a DAT company's market valuation to the value of the crypto it holds: above 1.0 is a premium, below 1.0 is a discount. It is a category-1 metric, and it is not as settled as it looks.

There is more than one formula. DefiLlama's published methodology is mNAV_B = (FD shares_B x Share price) / Crypto Treasury Value, computed across three dilution buckets it calls Realized, Realistic and Maximum, and it excludes cash, bonds, equities and other non-crypto assets from the denominator. CoinDesk describes the more common version as comparing enterprise value, meaning market cap plus debt minus cash, to the market value of the holdings. The numerators therefore differ: DefiLlama prices equity alone, the common version prices equity plus debt minus cash. Since enterprise value and market cap diverge whenever a company carries debt or cash, the two formulas will not return the same number for the same company on the same day, so mNAV figures are not portable between sources without checking which formula produced them. The metric is also contested on the merits: Greg Cipolaro, global head of research at NYDIG, called it “woefully deficient” in CoinDesk on 2025-11-30, on grounds that include its assuming convertible notes convert to equity and its ignoring the value of the operating business.

For a category-3 DAT the ratio is still computable - market capitalisation over treasury value is the direct analogue - but the dilution machinery is not. DefiLlama's Realized, Realistic and Maximum buckets exist because share counts change, and a token with no shares has nothing to dilute. No mNAV is published for $LDAT on this site, and an mNAV quoted for any protocol-native token is worth little unless the source states which formula it used.

What the market already calls category 3

“Protocol-native DAT” is the phrase this site uses for the shape. The shape itself is not new and is not nameless: it is commonly called a “strategy token.” The lineage runs through TokenWorks' family of contracts, which tax their own trading, buy a reserve asset, relist it at a markup, and use the proceeds to buy back and burn their own token. Live examples, read on-chain on 2026-07-16:

On scale: The Defiant reported that the NFTStrategy ecosystem passed $202 million in combined market capitalisation at its peak. Three of those tokens - PunkStrategy, PudgyStrategy and ApeStrategy - together sit near $9.8 million measured on GeckoTerminal on 2026-07-16, more than an order of magnitude below that peak, with 24-hour volumes in the low tens of thousands of dollars or less. This is a small, experimental and currently contracted corner of DeFi.

Which category is on-chainDAT, and what it cannot answer for you

on-chainDAT is category 3, and only category 3. There is no on-chainDAT company to buy shares in, no share register, no filing, no tokenized equity and no claim on any legal entity. The project is operated by PaTRoN Labs, described in our Terms of Service as “an unincorporated team of independent open-source contributors.” It is not affiliated with Linea, ConsenSys, Base, Coinbase, Uniswap or TokenWorks.

If you arrived here asking how to buy shares in a bitcoin treasury company, what a company's mNAV is, how a DAT's convertible notes are structured, or how tokenized stock settles, those are categories 1 and 2, and the sources linked above address them directly.

What $LDAT actually is

A DAT here launches on top of an existing token: if a token $XXX exists, a $XXXDAT can launch on top of it. $LDAT launched on 2026-06-09 on Linea L2 (chain 59144) at 0x02F289E429655d0C0D713A7dFD26850A81f7cFC5, on top of $LINEA. The contracts are open source and verified on Lineascan. What the current code does:

  • The fee. Every trade pays 10%, collected inside the pool's own Uniswap v4 hook. There is no exemption path from the swap fee. The hook splits each fee 80/20: 80% into the treasury, 20% to project-controlled fee destinations, which today makes the split 8% treasury and 2% project. Those destinations are owner-settable, not fixed in code. During the first 89 minutes after trading opened on 2026-06-09, the buy fee started at 99% and decayed to 10% at 100 basis points a minute; see FAQ.
  • The loop. Fees arrive as ETH, because the pool pairs $LDAT against ETH. The treasury spends that ETH buying 150,000-LINEA bags from anyone willing to sell one, and relists each bag for 1.2x the ETH it paid. When a bag sells, the ETH proceeds fund a buyback that burns $LDAT. That call is permissionless and pays the caller 0.5%.
  • Supply. MAX_SUPPLY is 1,000,000,000, minted once at initialisation, and the current code has no further mint path. The entire supply was seeded into the Uniswap v4 pool at launch and the LP position was burned, so nobody can withdraw the liquidity. See Tokenomics.
  • Transfers. Tokens are non-transferable by ordinary ERC-20 transfer: BaseStrategy.sol reverts with InvalidTransfer(). The contract keeps an owner-controlled whitelist (isDistributor) of addresses exempt from that gate. Wallet-to-wallet moves go through a whitelisted relay that burns a 1% fee, live since 2026-06-21. See LDAT.

What is materially risky about this implementation

As of 2026-07-16:

  • The contracts are upgradeable. The logic described on this page can be replaced, which means the supply and transfer rules above are properties of the current code rather than guarantees. The intention is to revoke upgradeability once post-launch testing completes, but no date has been committed to.
  • The owner can change some headline numbers without an upgrade. updateBagSize is owner-only and its sole constraint is that the new size is greater than zero, so the 150,000-LINEA bag is a current value rather than a constant. The buy-and-burn drip rate is owner-settable too (setTwapIncrement, setTwapDelayInBlocks). Changing either needs no redeploy and no delay. The 1.2x relist multiplier is not in this group: setPriceMultiplier is gated to the factory, and the deployed factory exposes no path that reaches it, so the multiplier moves only if the implementation is upgraded.
  • On bag size, $LDAT is more owner-mutable than the contract it forks. TokenWorks' v3 freezes bagSize permanently after the first purchase. $LDAT deliberately diverges and keeps it settable, because $LINEA is volatile and a frozen bag size drifts too thick or too thin.
  • Ownership is a 2-of-3 Safe multisig. Two keyholders can act. Nothing has been renounced. Every peer implementation checked for this page is in the same position, which is a fact about the category rather than a defence of this one.
  • The 2% project share is not held at arm's length. It is paid to a fee address that is also one of the three signers on the owning Safe.
  • There is no third-party audit. The contracts are open source and verified on Lineascan and the treasury is readable on-chain, but no external auditor has reviewed any of it.
  • This project is not first at anything and does not claim to be. $LDAT is a fork of TokenWorks' wBTCStrategy v3, and Bankless dates that lineage's PunkStrategy to September 2025. Injective used “first onchain digital asset treasury (DAT)” publicly in July 2025. This is one experimental implementation among several.
  • This is not an investment product. Our Terms of Service state that the Services are “experimental prototypes provided solely for educational, artistic, and informational purposes,” that PaTRoN Labs “makes no representations that the Services will operate in any particular manner or produce any economic return,” and that they “are not deployed for profit generation, investment solicitation, or speculative trading.”

The short version

A DAT company is a listed business that holds crypto and sells you shares. Tokenized DAT equity is that company's stock, issued on-chain, with the rights intact. A protocol-native DAT is a smart contract with a treasury, no shares and no obligor. Synthetic price exposure to a DAT company's stock is a fourth thing again. All of them get called DATs; only the third describes $LDAT.