Ethereum Treasury Aims to Foil Short Sellers With ‘Loyalty Payment’ as Shares Trade at Discount to Holdings

Ethereum treasury firm BTCS has offered investors a one-time payment for making their shares illiquid on Monday, saying that it would help them foil Wall Street short sellers.

Those who hold BTCS shares with the company’s transfer agent will receive a “loyalty payment” of $0.35 per share in January, the company said in a press release, while unveiling a $0.05 dividend that will be payable in Ethereum in September as well.

BTCS shares rose nearly 9% to $4.81 on Monday, according to Yahoo Finance. Shares have cooled from a three-year high of $8.49 last month but are still up 83.4% year-to-date.

BTCS’ shares trade at a discount relative to its crypto holdings. Although the company held 70,000 ETH worth $303 million on Monday, its market cap stood around $215 million, yielding a so-called mNAV of 0.75, the lowest among firms tracked by Strategic Ethereum Reserve.

Experts say that discounts can spell danger for crypto treasury firms, constraining their ability to raise funds in a way that would increase the amount of crypto they own per share.

BTCS CEO Charles Allen told Decrypt on Monday that the discount stems from hedge funds betting on a drop in BTCS’ stock price, as opposed to a lack of investor confidence in BTCS or its $100 million Ethereum-buying plan unveiled last month.

“People are betting against us,” he said. “If 90% of our shares are held by retail shareholders in four brokerage firms, and those brokerage firms pull all the shares together and loan them out to the short sellers, [then] we have a major problem.”

BTCS’ short interest represented 7.4% of the company’s float, according to Fintel. That was relatively higher than Ethereum treasury firms BitMine Immersion Technologies and SharpLink Gaming, totaling 4% and 6.5% on Monday, respectively. 

Allen’s call for investors to move shares to “book entry” with the company’s transfer agent is reminiscent of a scheme devised by GameStop’s community, in which the meme stock’s devotees organized to directly register shares with Computershare.

By registering shares with the company’s transfer agent, investors can effectively restrict how those securities are used. Platforms like Robinhood and Charles Schwab typically allow customers to opt out of stock lending programs, albeit to varying degrees of difficulty.

As BTCS shareholders tap the company’s transfer agent, the hope is that “shares available to borrow are going to get squeezed out,” making it more costly to short the stock, Allen added

BTCS uses an Equity Stock Transfer agent as its record keeper, and Allen acknowledged that there may be drawbacks for certain investors because they can’t readily sell their shares. Processing a transfer may take three to five business days.

Allen noted that BTCS, established in 2013, runs Ethereum validators and a block-building business, in addition to its Ethereum treasury strategy. The company has also leveraged decentralized finance protocols, such as AAVE, to raise capital, he added.

BTCS shareholders have to fill out a form on the company’s website and provide a digital wallet address in order to receive the dividend, dubbed a “Bividend,” in the form of Ethereum. If shareholders take no action, they will receive $0.05 per share through traditional means.