When JAN3 Chief Executive Samson Mow calls an entire category of publicly traded companies "massively undervalued," it is worth pausing to understand the structural argument underneath that claim. In a recent video interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Mow laid out a thesis that corporate Bitcoin treasury firms — with Strategy as the flagship example — are not only misunderstood by traditional equity markets but are, in his view, among the most consequential actors in the current Bitcoin supply dynamic.
The argument rests on a specific functional identity Mow assigns to these firms: they are buyers of last resort. That phrase carries weight in monetary policy circles, where central banks play that role to backstop collapsing markets. Mow is repurposing the concept for a deflationary asset with a hard supply cap. If no seller can shake a treasury firm out of its position — because the corporate mandate is to accumulate, not trade — then these entities represent a qualitatively different kind of market participant than a hedge fund or a retail investor. They do not flip. They absorb.
This framing matters enormously for how one reads the supply side of Bitcoin's market structure. The 21 million coin ceiling is well understood in crypto circles, but what Mow is pointing toward is something more dynamic: a race in which sovereign wealth funds, nation-states, and corporations are beginning to compete for a share of that fixed pool simultaneously. He describes this as a global scarcity race — not a metaphor but a structural reality in which every Bitcoin locked inside a corporate treasury is permanently removed from secondary market circulation, tightening available float for every other participant.
Strategy, the company formerly known as MicroStrategy and led by Michael Saylor, has become the canonical case study for this treasury model. It pioneered the practice of using equity issuance and convertible debt to fund continuous Bitcoin purchases, essentially transforming a software-era balance sheet into a Bitcoin acquisition vehicle. Competitors and imitators have since emerged globally, suggesting that what began as one executive's conviction is evolving into a recognized institutional asset allocation pattern. Mow's contention is that the market still has not priced this correctly — that the premium these companies should command for their structural role as perpetual accumulators is not yet reflected in their equity valuations.
There is a credible analytical basis for skepticism too, which any balanced reading of Mow's position demands. Critics of the treasury company model point out that premium valuations above net asset value depend on continued market enthusiasm for the strategy itself, and that leverage used to accumulate Bitcoin introduces refinancing risk if sentiment turns. The model works elegantly in an appreciating market and becomes fragile if Bitcoin enters an extended drawdown while debt maturities approach. Mow does not appear to address that risk scenario in his framing, which is worth noting.
Nevertheless, the "buyers of last resort" framing introduces a genuinely interesting market microstructure observation. When a pool of institutional actors is structurally committed to buying and structurally prohibited from panic-selling, they behave less like investors and more like infrastructure. Their accumulation compresses the supply available to price-sensitive traders, which — all else equal — should exert upward pressure on the price discovery process over time. Whether that dynamic is already priced into equities like Strategy, or whether Mow is correct that the market has not caught up, is ultimately an empirical question that only time and price action will answer.
What Mow's commentary does do, regardless of one's view on valuations, is sharpen the vocabulary around a phenomenon that markets are still trying to categorize. Bitcoin treasury firms are not simply tech companies that bought some crypto. They are a new kind of financial entity — hybrid vehicles that blend equity market access with commodity accumulation — and existing valuation frameworks built around earnings multiples and revenue growth are poorly suited to analyze them. The debate about whether Strategy and its cohort are undervalued or fairly priced is in part a debate about which analytical lens to use at all.
The global scarcity race framing also has geopolitical implications that extend well beyond corporate finance. If nation-states begin treating Bitcoin accumulation as a strategic reserve objective — a trajectory that several jurisdictions have already flirted with — then corporate treasury firms are competing not just with other investors but with sovereign balance sheets. That changes the character of the competition entirely, and lends Mow's "buyers of last resort" description a harder edge. In that scenario, undervalued would be an understatement.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Bitcoin News.