Metaplanet ranked first in the normalized CEBE scorecard, the highest CEBE growth of the eight companies tracked. CEBE up 65.6%, drag down 5.7 points from summer. The ranking is right. But the ranking skips Q4 2025, the quarter where BPS rose and CEBE fell. That quarter is the article.
In Q4 2025, Metaplanet issued shares that were deeply accretive by sats-per-share. BPS rose 11.9%. Every standard metric said the quarter was strong. CEBE fell 4.5%. The gap between those two readings was $405 million in new senior claims that the two frameworks treated differently. One assumes conversion and the other treats it as the claim it is today.
One quarter later, in Q1 2026, the company added zero new claims. Drag compressed and CEBE outpaced BPS. Same company, same capital allocation discipline, opposite direction. One variable explains both quarters.
That is the Metaplanet story. Not the stock price. Not the sentiment. Two frameworks, one instrument, two different assumptions about what it represents. The gap that only appears when you ask what common equity actually owns today.
The Sharpest Moment in This Dataset
In Q4, FD BPS assumed MERCURY would convert. Under that assumption, the face value disappears as a claim and the potential conversion shares enter the denominator (which is what "fully diluted" means). The claim is gone and the dilution is in. CEBE makes the opposite assumption. At Y300 per share against a Y1,000 conversion trigger, MERCURY is not converting. Under that assumption, the face value stays as a senior claim against the BTC reserve and basic shares are used. Same instrument, two different assumptions about what it represents today. The $405M difference in those two assumptions is the gap between +11.9% and -4.5%.
In Q1, both metrics improved. No new claims meant no gap. Drag compressed by 3.3 points on the strength of BTC accumulation alone. The lesson from the two quarters together is that adding senior claims is the decision that creates the gap between BPS and CEBE, and the absence of new claims is what closes it. Management built a capital structure that carries both outcomes. The instrument design is the point.
The Progression
Seven quarters of verified data, normalized to $72K BTC throughout. The FD BPS column shows what the market typically measures. The CEBE column shows what common shareholders actually own after netting senior claims.
| Period | BTC | Shares (M) | Net Claims ($M) | Claims BTC | CE BTC | CEBE (sats) | Change | Drag | FD BPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q3 2024 | 399 | 181.7 | $5.4 | 75 | 324 | 178 | baseline | 18.8% | 220 |
| Q4 2024 | 1,762 | 362.7 | $69.0 | 958 | 804 | 222 | +24.3% | 54.4% | 486 |
| Q1 2025 | 4,046 | 459.8 | $86.8 | 1,206 | 2,840 | 618 | +178.8% | 29.8% | 880 |
| Q2 2025 | 13,350 | 654.7 | $181.0 | 2,514 | 10,836 | 1,655 | +167.9% | 18.8% | 2,039 |
| Q3 2025 — The Golden Quarter | 30,823 | 1,141.0 | $9.7 | 135 | 30,688 | 2,690 | +62.5% | 0.4% | 2,701 |
| Q4 2025 — Claims Added | 35,102 | 1,142.3 | $415.4 | 5,769 | 29,333 | 2,568 | -4.5% | 16.4% | 3,073 |
| Q1 2026 — Current | 40,177 | 1,274.1 | $378.5 | 5,257 | 34,920 | 2,741 | +6.7% | 13.1% | 3,153 |
| All CEBE figures normalized to $72K BTC. FD BPS = fully diluted shares per market convention. CEBE = basic shares, senior claims netted from BTC. Sources: FY2025 tanshin, Q1 FY2026 tanshin, Metaplanet Analytics, BTC Yield table Apr 2 filing. | |||||||||
Progression snapshot
Q3 2024: 399 BTC, 178 sats CEBE, 18.8% drag → Q2 2025: 13,350 BTC, 1,655 sats, 18.8% drag → Q3 2025 (golden quarter): 30,823 BTC, 2,690 sats, 0.4% drag → Q4 2025 (claims added): 35,102 BTC, 2,568 sats, 16.4% drag → Q1 2026 (current): 40,177 BTC, 2,741 sats, 13.1% drag. All CEBE normalized to $72K BTC.
Two numbers jump out. Q3 2025 drag at 0.4%, the cleanest balance sheet any tracked company achieved in this cycle. Q4 2025 drag reached 16.4%, created by a single quarter of financing. Both were intentional decisions. The first was a consequence of bond maturity timing. The second funded the next accumulation phase.
Three Phases, Three Capital Structures
Metaplanet's treasury history breaks into three distinct chapters, each with a different financing mechanism and a different CEBE dynamic. Understanding the phases makes Q4's anomaly legible.
The Capital Structure: Dual Currency, Double Compression
Metaplanet carries two distinct claim types, and the mechanics of each produce different drag behavior. Understanding the difference changes how you read the sensitivity table.
USD Credit Facility — $247M Outstanding
A USD-denominated revolving facility. Single compression: the claim shrinks in BTC terms only as BTC/USD rises. Metaplanet repaid $32.86M during Q1 2026; the confirmed closing balance is $247.14M. Further repayment is planned from equity raise proceeds. Every dollar repaid directly reduces drag without touching the share count.
MERCURY Class B Preferred — Y23.61B (~$148M)
Issued December 29, 2025. This is the instrument that created Q4's anomaly. MERCURY carries a 4.9% fixed annual dividend paid quarterly, and every payment is cash. That is worth stating precisely because the comparison to Strategy's preferred stack invites a false equivalence. Strategy can service STRK and STRD by paying dividends in shares, deferring the cash drain. The Japanese Companies Act prohibits that entirely: Article 454 bars a company from distributing its own shares as dividends, so there is no share-payment election available to Metaplanet. The instruments also diverge on tax treatment; Strategy's preferred dividends qualify as Return of Capital under US tax law, deferring the tax burden onto holders rather than generating immediate taxable income. Japan has no equivalent mechanism. MERCURY holders receive ordinary taxable income on cash they actually receive. These are not minor structural footnotes. They define the cash demand the instrument places on the company. From a CEBE perspective, the more consequential feature is something else entirely: MERCURY is yen-denominated.
Yen denomination means double compression. As BTC rises in USD terms, the USD value of the yen-denominated claim shrinks. If the yen also weakens against the dollar (as it has historically during Bitcoin bull markets), the compression accelerates further. Two forces compress the same claim simultaneously. This is structurally different from Strategy's USD-denominated preferred stack, where only one force is at work.
Conversion at Y1,000 per share (approximately $6.50 at Y154/$). At current prices around Y300 per share, the conversion option is deeply out of the money. The realistic resolution path for MERCURY is not conversion but continued dividend payments or eventual redemption.
Drag Sensitivity by BTC Price
Both claim types shrink in BTC terms as price rises. The drag sensitivity below shows the combined effect at Q1 2026 capital structure. The double compression from yen-denominated MERCURY is included; FX held at Y150/$ throughout for comparability. Drag figures reflect Q1 filings; subsequent BTC accumulation and credit facility repayment will have moved these figures. Check the live dashboard for current drag.
Note what the drag column shows: a $27K BTC move from $45K to $72K compresses drag by roughly 14 points. The same $27K move from $72K to $99K compresses it by only 3 points. Drag compression is front-loaded. The steepest gains in common equity ownership happen at the lowest prices, exactly when the market is most fearful.
The Negative Wrapper Fee
Every Bitcoin treasury company has a cost of existing: board compensation, legal fees, listing costs, financing costs. CEBE calls this the wrapper fee. It is expressed as a percentage of the BTC reserve value and compresses as BTC appreciates.
Metaplanet is the only company in this dataset where income exceeds those costs. The mechanism is the Bitcoin Income Generation (BIG) options business: Metaplanet sells covered call options on its Bitcoin position and deposits the premium income. FY2025 actual data, verified from tanshin filings:
FY2025 actuals from tanshin filings. Note: the live dashboard at cebetracker.io reflects current wrapper calculations at today's BTC price and includes credit facility interest as a separate line item. At current BTC price (~$68K), the net wrapper runs at approximately -0.19% as BIG income and the larger BTC reserve denominator both shift the ratio.
BIG revenue is growing. Q1 FY2026 alone generated Y2,969M against Q4 FY2025's Y4,241M. On a trailing twelve-month basis through Q1 FY2026, BIG income was Y10,779M, an annualized pace that makes the wrapper deeply negative even after MERCURY dividends begin compounding.
The BIG cut in Q1 reduced Metaplanet's effective BTC acquisition cost by Y585,080 per BTC. Net effective cost: Y11,955,713 versus the headline Y12,540,793. Most treasury companies accept the wrapper as a fixed cost of leverage and rely on BTC appreciation to overwhelm it. Metaplanet is building revenue to make the wrapper structurally negative. That is a different playbook and it is working.
The Warrant Overhang: Net New Dilution vs Headline Numbers
Community discussion has focused on a large headline warrant count. The headline overstates near-term pressure materially. The structure matters as much as the count.
| Instrument | Potential Shares | Status | Strike | CEBE Impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 26th Series (fixed Y410) | 107,368,000 | Active Apr 2026 – Mar 2028 | Y410 fixed | Dilutive above ~$88K BTC |
| 27th Series (MS, floor Y298) | 100,000,000 | Active Apr 16, 2026 | Y373, adj. daily | Accretive by design |
| 23rd/24th Series (frozen) | 210,000,000 | Frozen through Dec 8, 2027 | — | Not active |
| Net new dilution (active only) | ~105,000,000 | Not 315M | — | ~8% of current count |
| 23rd and 24th Series frozen through December 8, 2027. Net active dilution is the 26th and 27th Series only. Moving-strike warrants (27th Series) are accretive by construction when exercised above NAV per share. | ||||
Warrant structure
26th Series (fixed Y410, active): 107M shares, dilutive above ~$88K BTC · 27th Series (moving strike Y373, active Apr 16): 100M shares, accretive by design · 23rd/24th Series: 210M shares frozen through Dec 2027 · Net active dilution: ~105M shares (~8% of current count)
The 27th Series warrants, exercisable from April 16, 2026, carry a moving strike: Y373 adjusting daily to the prior close, with a floor of Y298 and an absolute floor of Y187. Moving-strike warrants are accretive by design; the strike tracks market price, so each exercise brings proceeds close to market value. The 26th Series at fixed Y410 is a different calculation: above roughly $88K BTC (where the stock at Y410 implies mNAV near 1x), those warrants are dilutive. Below that price, they are accretive.
The frozen warrants are the number that inflates the headline. 210 million shares locked through December 2027 carry no near-term dilution risk. They are not in the active warrant count. Net new dilution from currently active warrants is approximately 105 million shares, or roughly 8% of the current basic count.
Capital Allocation Policy: Codified March 16, 2026
On March 16, 2026, Metaplanet filed a formal capital allocation policy. This matters because it removes ambiguity from future financing decisions and gives shareholders a framework for evaluating management execution.
mNAV < 1x → Do NOT issue common (except rights offerings)
mNAV < 1x → Execute buybacks (funded from cash, preferred, credit facility, BIG income)
Leverage target: borrowings at approximately 1/10th of BTCNAV
Strategic goals: enterprise value maximization, BTC Yield maximization, mNAV improvement
The buyback authorization covers 150 million shares at up to Y75B, active through October 28, 2026. Zero shares have been repurchased through March 31, 2026. At the time of writing, mNAV sits at approximately 1.04x, above the buyback trigger but close enough that the policy creates an active floor. The authorization is a real instrument, not a press release.
That policy reflects a clear-eyed understanding of what management can and cannot control. BTC price moves independently while mNAV is set by markets. BTC Yield is the one variable that responds directly to financing decisions, accumulation pace, and instrument design, which is why it anchors the primary KPI. The policy is a framework for converting windows of market opportunity into permanent increases in BTC per share.
Building Japan's Bitcoin Ecosystem
The capital structure is one dimension of the Metaplanet story. The institutional infrastructure being built around it is another, and the two reinforce each other in ways the wrapper fee table only partially captures.
The BIG options business is the most financially direct link. It generates income against the BTC reserve, making the wrapper negative. Metaplanet has now expanded well beyond that single mechanism. In FY2025, the company launched Bitcoin custody services for Japanese institutions, began a Bitcoin yield product for retail investors, and partnered with Japanese financial entities exploring Bitcoin-collateralized lending. Each initiative either generates income that offsets wrapper costs or creates demand for Bitcoin exposure in a market with structural demand constraints (Japanese pension funds and insurance companies face allocation restrictions that Bitcoin treasury companies partially sidestep).
This ecosystem matters for the CEBE framework because it represents income that the wrapper fee table does not yet capture. The wrapper shows FY2025 actuals. What BIG options generated in FY2025 was built on a foundation that did not exist in FY2024. The same trajectory applied to custody and yield products implies a wrapper that grows increasingly negative over time.
How the Pieces Connect
Metaplanet's capital structure has multiple moving parts, each originated under different market conditions and each carrying a different resolution path. Reading them in isolation misses the interaction. It's more precise to state that each instrument was introduced to compensate for a structural limitation in the one before it. The capital structure is not a static design. It is an adaptive system that has been patching its own failure modes in real time.
The original financing tool was the warrant structure. It worked when mNAV was elevated but could not fire when the stock fell below the fixed floor price. When that constraint became binding in the drawdown, the BTC income business and the credit facility were introduced as parallel mechanisms to sustain accumulation when warrants could not. When preferred issuance became viable, MERCURY added a funding channel that did not require common dilution, issued into a market already two months into its correction. The April 2026 ATM warrants with moving strikes are the latest iteration which replaced the fixed floor that caused the original constraint, with a floor that adjusts daily to the prior close.
Designed for a higher price: The MERCURY preferred was issued December 29, 2025, two months into a correction that began after BTC's October 2025 peak. By issuance date, BTC had already pulled back materially from its highs and the stock was well below its own peak. The $150K consensus was still the operating assumption for 2026. The conversion trigger at Y1,000 was not designed for where prices were at issuance, it was designed for where most participants expected them to go. The 4.9% dividend is cheap leverage if BTC compounds at 30%+ annually. At Y300 and $72K BTC, MERCURY transforms into a drag instrument and the conversion trigger is deeply out of reach. The instrument was not reckless at issuance. The price it required simply has not materialized.
Structured for the drawdown: The Capital Allocation Policy was codified in March 2026, during the correction. Management did not write policy during euphoria they wrote it during fear. The policy explicitly protects common equity from dilution below 1x mNAV. The buyback authorization sits loaded. The moving-strike 27th Series warrants were structured to be accretive by design regardless of market level.
Running through both environments: The BIG options business was active in the bull market and generates income in the bear market. It does not stop when prices fall. In fact, elevated volatility in a drawdown can increase option premiums and BIG income simultaneously. The negative wrapper is not a bull-market artifact it is a structural feature.
The system's design logic is consistent across all these instruments. Convert an uncontrollable variable (mNAV) into a controllable one (BTC per share) during the windows when the market allows it. CEBE measures whether each conversion succeeded.
The $150K That Never Came
This section appears in every deep dive in this series. It is not a price prediction. It is decision archaeology. Running the math at the price the architects had in mind when they designed these instruments.
The static math shows a 7.8% CEBE improvement from $72K to $150K. But the static calculation understates what $150K actually activates.
At $150K, MERCURY's double compression is amplified. If yen weakness accompanies a Bitcoin bull run (as it did in 2024), the yen-denominated claim shrinks in two directions simultaneously. Drag falls faster than the BTC-price-only model suggests.
At $150K, the MERCURY conversion trigger at Y1,000 becomes plausible. If the stock recovers to conversion levels, MERCURY converts to equity rather than requiring cash dividend payments indefinitely. The preferred disappears from the claim stack and becomes dilution in the common count. At 40 million shares on a 1.27 billion share base, that is 3.1% dilution in exchange for eliminating the preferred claim entirely. CEBE math favors conversion strongly.
At $150K, the Capital Allocation Policy's common issuance gate (mNAV > 1x) is open by a wide margin. Every share Metaplanet issues above 1x mNAV is accretive to CEBE. The accumulation engine accelerates at the price it was designed for.
The credit facility at ~7.5% interest was signed when the BTC/borrow spread was wide. At $150K, that spread is even wider. The instruments that look like costs at $72K become the machinery of compounding at $150K.
What Common Equity Owns
At $72K BTC, with the capital structure as verified at Q1 2026 close (April 2, 2026). Subsequent accumulation and credit facility repayment mean current drag is lower than shown here. The live dashboard at cebetracker.io reflects updated figures.
The gap between FD BPS (3,153) and CEBE (2,741) is 412 sats per share. That gap is the value of the senior claims: the USD credit facility and MERCURY preferred, converted to BTC terms at current price. It is not hidden. It is precisely quantified. CEBE makes it visible in every snapshot.
Drag at 13.1% is the fourth-lowest in the eight-company peer set. The negative wrapper fee is unique in the dataset. Common equity owns 86.9% of a 40,177 BTC reserve. Those are the facts on the balance sheet today.
The challenge is the resolution path for the two remaining claims. The credit facility is being repaid; every $33M tranche removed (as in Q1) directly improves CEBE without requiring any new shares. MERCURY is a longer-duration question. Its 4.9% dividend is a mandatory cash obligation with no share-payment alternative under Japanese law, which makes the BIG income surplus structurally necessary rather an interesting distinction. At Y1,157M in annual MERCURY dividends against Y10,779M in trailing BIG income, coverage runs at roughly 9x. The yen denomination compounds the advantage over time, since the claim compresses in both USD and BTC terms as BTC rises and the yen weakens. Conversion at Y1,000 remains the cleanest resolution if prices recover. Until then, the BIG engine services the obligation and the double compression does the rest.
Addressing the Common Arguments
BPS framing. CEBE shows drag compresses at any mNAV when no new claims are added. Q1 2026 proved this: mNAV was near 1x, shares were issued, and CEBE still rose 6.7%. The negative wrapper fee means time benefits common equity even in a sideways market. The Capital Allocation Policy codifies buybacks below 1x, creating a structural floor on the mNAV discount.
Sustained high mNAV is structurally difficult even when fundamentals are strong. As we have seen, an elevated premium attracts short interest, those shorts suppress the premium, and the new moving-strike ATM warrants create a second ceiling from inside the structure itself (high mNAV triggers warrant exercise, exercise creates dilution pressure, that pressure suppresses mNAV). Two ceiling mechanisms, one external and one internal.
Near-1x mNAV is not dead money but rather it is the equilibrium the structure tends toward absent a strong external catalyst.
The analogy has surface validity and structural limits. Both are Bitcoin-first treasury strategies with aggressive accumulation mandates. But the claim types are different, the cash obligations are different, and the compression dynamics are different. Yen-denominated claims compress in two directions simultaneously; USD claims compress in one. The Japanese Companies Act prohibits share-paid dividends, making every MERCURY payment a hard cash obligation that Strategy's preferred stack can sometimes avoid. The BIG income business creates a structurally negative wrapper that has no analog in Strategy's capital structure. These are not cosmetic differences. They produce materially different CEBE outcomes across the same range of BTC price scenarios.
There is a sharper answer to this analogy, and it comes from Metaplanet's own March 18, 2026 supplementary presentation. When Metaplanet prices a capital raise, the formula they use is:
mNAV = EV / BTC NAV, where EV = Market Cap + Debt + Preferreds − Cash
That numerator is the CEBE numerator. Debt plus preferreds minus cash is net senior claims. Metaplanet computes it because they need to know what common equity is actually worth before they approve a financing. Their own deck states the gate explicitly that the raises require mNAV ≥ 1.01x. They are doing the claims math to protect common shareholders from dilution below break-even. The CEBE framework is not external analysis imposed on their capital structure. It is the arithmetic their own treasury team uses to price it.
The mapping is exact. (D + P − C) / BTC Value is drag. 1 − Drag is common equity ownership. BTC NAV is the denominator. The accretion test is the mNAV gate. The one step Metaplanet's slide does not take is dividing the result by shares outstanding. That step is what CEBE adds. At the snapshot in their March 18 deck, the math reads: BPS 3,008 sats, CEBE 2,514 sats, gap 494 sats, 16.4% of the BTC reserve committed to senior claims. Numbers from their own presentation, computed from their own formula. The Q1 2026 close figures in this article reflect subsequent capital structure changes ($247.14M confirmed debt, $147.97M MERCURY at current FX, drag 13.1%) but the math is identical.
Strategy and Metaplanet are both Bitcoin-first treasury companies. The analogy ends there. The claim types are different, the legal structure is different, the income business is different, and even the internal pricing methodology produces different dynamics at the per-share level. The Japan's MicroStrategy frame flattens all of that into one comparison. CEBE doesn't because it evaluates nuance the common KPIs ignore.
| Metaplanet's Slide | CEBE Equivalent |
|---|---|
| Debt + Prefs − Cash | Net Senior Claims |
| (D + P − C) / BTC Value | Drag |
| 1 − Drag | Common Equity Ownership % |
| BTC NAV (denominator) | Total BTC Value |
| mNAV ≥ 1.01x gate | Accretion Test |
| BTC per Share | BPS (pre-claims) |
| ??? | CEBE (post-claims, per share) |
| Source: Metaplanet Supplementary Presentation, March 18, 2026. Every step matches except the last. CEBE divides by shares outstanding. That is the only difference. | |
Forward Catalysts
Finish the Math
Metaplanet ranked first in the scorecard. That ranking is correct. CEBE grew 65.6% normalized over nine months, more than any other company in the peer set. Management executed the accumulation math correctly in every quarter but one, and Q4's anomaly was not an execution failure. It was a financing decision that added $405 million in claims faster than BTC appreciation could absorb them.
Q1 corrected Q4 without any structural intervention. Zero new claims, continued accumulation, and drag fell 3.3 points. The capital structure is working as designed at current prices. At $150K, the instruments designed for that environment become fully operational: MERCURY's double compression accelerates, the common issuance gate opens permanently, and the BIG options business scales proportionally to the reserve.
What BPS shows across this period: eight quarters of accretive execution, one anomalous quarter, then recovery. That reading is not wrong. It is incomplete. The incomplete reading misses the $405 million that made Q4 anomalous and credits the recovery to something other than the absence of new claims.
CEBE shows both movements, attributes both to their actual cause, and gives common equity shareholders a precise answer to the question that matters: what percentage of this Bitcoin reserve do we actually own, and how did that number change?
At $72K BTC and Q1 2026 filings: 86.9%. First of eight. The math is on the table.