Metaplanet (3350) has a rule that stops it selling shares when the market values the whole company at less than the Bitcoin (BTC) it holds. For most of the first half of 2026 it did, so the company stopped. Everything downstream of that, Bitcoin buying, trading income and progress against a full-year forecast it has not revised, came in below plan.
The Tokyo-listed company reported an ordinary loss, the Japanese measure sitting below operating profit that captures financing and other non-operating items, of ¥182.9bn for the six months to 30 Jun, against a ¥10.6bn profit a year earlier. Almost all of it is a ¥184.3bn valuation loss on Bitcoin, about $1.17bn at the ¥158 rate Metaplanet uses. No Bitcoin was sold. Revenue rose 134% to ¥4.9bn and operating profit 136% to ¥3.3bn.
The rule that shut off the equity tap
Metaplanet measures itself by mNAV, its enterprise value divided by the market value of its Bitcoin. Below 1.0x, issuing shares to buy more Bitcoin leaves each existing share with a smaller claim, and the policy is not to do it. It issued 131,897,000 shares in February and March, raising ¥53.0bn, then none in the second quarter.
The cost shows up in the options business, which writes contracts against the group's Bitcoin and cash and therefore scales with the collateral available. Second-quarter segment sales were ¥1,759mn against ¥2,983mn in the first quarter, down 41%. The year-on-year doubling in the headline is a half-year comparison and hides that.
Metaplanet has delivered 31% of its full-year revenue forecast and 29% of operating profit at the halfway mark, and has not cut the forecast. In its own words, the plan assumed a larger asset base than the company was able to build under its policy.
Cash, not coverage, is the constraint
The presentation leads on asset coverage of 4.1x, which the company is careful to call indicative rather than a credit rating. Dividends and interest are paid in cash, and that is where the half looks tight.
Cash fell to ¥1,087mn from ¥2,552mn and USD Coin holdings to ¥250mn from ¥14,892mn, taking the two together from about ¥17.4bn to ¥1.3bn in six months. Interest expense was ¥1,805mn and operating cash flow ¥349mn. Metaplanet had drawn $414mn of a $500mn credit facility at 30 Jun, and that lender holds priority over the Bitcoin pledged to it. Preferred dividends declared for the first two quarters come to about ¥578mn, with the full-year forecast at roughly ¥1.16bn.
A third funding pillar, and a broker
With equity shut off, Metaplanet has added debt and bought the channel to sell it through. It acquired Siiibo Securities for ¥2.1bn, completing on 13 Jul and renaming it Metaplanet Securities, a Type I operator running an online private-placement bond platform that has handled more than 100 issues for over 40 issuers.
Through it, the company placed its first bonds under a programme called BitBonds in late July. They are yen-denominated, fixed-rate, unsecured senior obligations sold by private placement, with terms varying by series and no security over the group's Bitcoin, which puts holders behind the credit facility lender. Metaplanet's own chart plots the coupon above 4%, against a 2.24% average for Japanese retail corporate bonds issued from May to July with maturities of five years or less.
Strategy (MSTR) is further down this road. When the cash cost of its preferred stack rose, it started selling Bitcoin to fund distributions, the outcome a treasury company exists to avoid. Metaplanet is nowhere near that, with an 81% equity ratio and small obligations, but it is adding instruments that demand cash on a schedule, and is consulting the Tokyo Stock Exchange about listing perpetual preferred shares.
The valuation loss is an accounting event, as it was when the same thing happened a year ago. The number that matters more is mNAV. At the 13 Aug close of ¥223, Metaplanet's 1,281,283,624 shares are worth ¥285.7bn; add ¥77.3bn of liabilities and ¥23.6bn of preferred, subtract ¥1.1bn of cash, and enterprise value is about ¥385.5bn against the ¥434.3bn Bitcoin NAV the company published for 12 Aug. That is roughly 0.89x on Sandmark calculations. While it stays below one, the cheapest funding Metaplanet has is the funding it has promised not to use.
Bitcoin traded at around $63,400 at 11:50UTC. Metaplanet closed at ¥223 on 13 Aug, up 0.9%, but Tokyo closed before the results were published, so the reaction comes on 14 Aug.
