How this site measures Bitcoin treasury companies, and why
In a single week of June 2026, two of the sector's largest issuers publicly disagreed about what mNAV means, a third shipped a per share metric whose construction matched no published standard, and the chief executive of one major treasury company spent ten minutes on stage answering a definition question from the chief executive of another. None of these people were being careless. They were using the same words for different mathematics, because the sector has labels and conventions but no standard.
This page is the standard this site holds itself to. Every number published on cebetracker.io is produced by the rules below. The rules are stated so they can be checked, attacked, and improved. Where a rule involves a judgment call, the judgment is named and defended rather than absorbed silently into the output.
One sentence of positioning before the rules. CEBE is a measurement, not a verdict. It is an instrument panel, not a price target. It tells you what common shareholders own. It does not tell you what they should pay for it.
Everything on this site lives in one of four layers, and the boundaries between them are load bearing.
Measurement is the CEBE formula applied to verified filing data. It contains no assumptions about the future. Every input traces to a primary source, and every figure carries a VERIFIED or EST flag.
Mechanics is the modeler. It is deterministic arithmetic that computes whatever assumptions a user feeds it. The mechanics belong to the site. The assumptions belong to whoever sets the sliders.
Scenarios are projections built from measurements plus stated assumptions. A scenario belongs to the person who states the assumptions. This site publishes mechanics that anyone can use to build scenarios. It does not publish return predictions of its own.
Valuation is the structural risk layer, Claims Grade and Adjusted Claims %, which characterizes the quality and behavior of the claims the measurement counts. It grades instruments. It does not grade futures.
When you see a return projection described as a CEBE model, what you are seeing is a scenario built on CEBE measurements. The measurements are this site's responsibility. The scenario is its author's. The rules below are grouped under these layers, so you always know whether you are reading a measurement rule or a valuation judgment.
CEBE = (Total BTC - Net Senior Claims in BTC) / Basic Shares Outstanding x 100,000,000
Net Senior Claims = Debt + Preferred - Cash
Claims in BTC = Net Senior Claims (USD) / BTC Price
See the formula in motion on the framework page and the learn course.
The unit is satoshis per basic share.
Market capitalization in the multiples below is struck on basic shares outstanding, the same fact-based denominator the formula uses. This matters because market cap can be built on basic, diluted, or proximity weighted share counts, and an unstated choice hides the same modeling the rest of this page works to keep out of the measurement. Basic on both sides keeps the multiple in one coherent state.
Three construction choices define the metric, and each follows from one principle. The principles are stated first because they decide every hard case that follows.
Three principles decide every hard case in the formula. They are stated before the rules because the rules follow from them. Each principle names the part of the construction it governs.
Principle oneClaims sit at their legal accrued value until an actual transaction changes them. In both directions.
A convertible note that is deep in the money stays at face value in the claims line. It is never marked up to its conversion value, because conversion has not happened, and a share cannot be diluted by an event that has not occurred. A preferred trading at a discount to its liquidation preference stays at the accrued preference. It is never marked down to market, because the claim standing ahead of common shareholders is the legal preference, not the price at which the instrument changed hands today.
The symmetry is the point. Marking claims to market in either direction imports someone else's risk into the common shareholder's ownership measure. When a company actually retires a claim below face, the gain is real and CEBE records it on the date it happens. Until then, an unrealized discount is an opportunity, not property.
Cash netting follows the same logic in miniature. Cash offsets claims until it pays them, which is why Net Senior Claims subtracts cash. A dollar of treasury cash standing against a dollar of debt is a claim already provisioned for.
Principle twoA per share measurement must describe a single coherent state. The claims in the numerator and the shares in the denominator have to come from the same world.
CEBE describes the standing state. Claims exist at face, conversion has not been assumed, and the share count is the basic shares actually outstanding. Every instrument appears exactly once, in its current form.
FD BPS, the market's convention, describes the converted state for convertible instruments. The note has become shares, the shares are in the denominator, and the claim is gone. For converts, that is internally coherent. For everything that cannot convert, straight debt and most preferreds, FD BPS is simply blind. Those claims exist in the converted state too, and FD BPS counts them nowhere. This is why a preferred issuance can raise FD BPS while leaving the common shareholder's net position exactly unchanged.
The test catches the constructions that fail it. A metric that subtracts a convertible note as debt in the numerator while also counting its conversion shares in the denominator is describing a world where the same note is simultaneously repaid and converted. No shareholder can live in that world. Prudence is not a defense for incoherence. A number can be conservative or it can be a measurement, and when forced to choose, this site chooses measurement and labels conservatism as the scenario it is.
Principle threeBasic shares are a fact. Every fully diluted count is a model, and the issuer holds the knobs.
The basic share count is one observable number from the register. A fully diluted count requires choosing a method, Treasury Stock Method or as converted, deciding which instruments are rationally exercisable, and applying anti dilution exclusions. Two competent analysts running fully diluted on the same company at the same moment can produce different numbers and defend both. The label is one word wearing many methods.
Worse, the most common method is reflexive. A TSM denominator shrinks in a selloff as instruments fall out of the money and drop out of the count, which means the per share metric improves mechanically while shareholders lose money, and degrades mechanically in rallies. A measurement whose denominator is a function of the stock price has a feedback loop where its foundation should be.
So CEBE keeps the model out of the measurement. The denominator is basic shares. Dilution scenarios get their own clearly labeled instruments, conversion overhang, As Converted pro formas, and the issuer's own audited diluted count, which this site reports from EPS footnotes as the issuer's figure and never computes in house. The moment an analyst picks a fully diluted method, they have joined the drift instead of measuring it.
The denominator counts economic classes only. Where a company's structure includes a share class with no dividend rights and no liquidation rights, a pure voting instrument, that class is excluded, matching the issuer's own two class treatment in its audited per share calculations. Share counts measure ownership of economics, and a share with no economics is a vote wearing a share's costume.
What the formula counts, and in what state.
This section applies realize first and one state of the world to convertible instruments.
A convertible instrument has two possible futures. It stands until it is settled as a claim, or it converts and becomes shares. The measurement holds every convert in the standing state, claim at face, conversion not assumed, per the realize first principle.
The converted state is not a second headline number. It is shown where it is decision relevant, as a per instrument pro forma computed under the same rules, the As Converted CEBE for that instrument. The convert's claim leaves the numerator, its conversion shares enter the denominator, and every claim that cannot convert stays exactly where it was, because straight debt and preferreds do not vanish when a note becomes stock. Each convertible instrument therefore carries its own envelope, the standing state on one side and its converted state on the other, and the width of that envelope is the swing the instrument represents. For claims denominated in Bitcoin, the pro forma has a useful property, each tranche's step is independent of price and can be published in advance as a deterministic schedule.
The interpolation across each envelope is Adjusted Claims %, which weights each convertible claim by moneyness, on the observation that an instrument deep in the money behaves as equity and will most likely exit through dilution, while an instrument out of the money behaves as debt and will most likely be settled from the treasury. The bands, the weights, and the stress window are published in the Claims Grade rubric, stated as priors and open to challenge. This is the internal rule for the mixed case, and it lives in the valuation layer where probability belongs, not in the measurement where facts live.
FD BPS is not an honest measurement of the converted state. It is the market's incumbent convention, and it is reported on this site for comparability and for audit, not as a bound. It assumes conversion for convertible instruments while ignoring every claim that cannot convert, which means it measures no coherent state at all. The gap between FD BPS and CEBE is still information, but it is information about the convention, not about the company. It quantifies everything the incumbent metric hides, and it decomposes into two parts, the claims FD BPS never counted and the conversion it assumed.
A convert appearing as a claim in CEBE and as dilution in FD BPS is therefore not double counting. Double counting is one number counting an instrument twice. These are two numbers, each counting the instrument once, in different worlds, and only one of those worlds is internally consistent everywhere.
This section applies realize first to the preferred claim.
Three different numbers can describe the same preferred, and each answers a different question. Par answers what the instrument was issued at. Market answers what it trades at. Accrued liquidation preference answers what stands ahead of the common shareholder if seniority is ever enforced.
CEBE strips at accrued liquidation preference, because CEBE is measured from the common shareholder's seat, and the residual claimant's question is the third one. The market price of a preferred reflects the preferred holder's risks, rate risk and credit risk, and a selloff in the preferred does not reduce the claim standing ahead of common by one dollar. What a discounted preferred does represent is a retirement opportunity, and per the realize first principle, the gain is recorded when the company actually captures it.
Where a preferred's preference accrues or compounds, the accrued figure is used. Deferral of dividends does not shrink a claim. It grows one.
What the counted claims are made of, and how the market prices them.
The measurement treats every claim at face. The valuation layer characterizes what the face is attached to, because identical dollar amounts can carry opposite behavior.
Fiat denominated claims compress as Bitcoin rises. The claim is fixed in dollars while the treasury floats, so Claims % falls in a rally and expands in a drawdown. Claims denominated in other currencies add a second variable, and can compress twice or expand twice depending on the currency pair. Bitcoin denominated claims do not compress at all. Their Claims % is static across every price, responding only to discrete conversion events, which produces a staircase where fiat claims produce a curve. And collateral backed claims with forced liquidation triggers can convert a drawdown into a forced sale, which is a different kind of risk than any ratio expresses, and receives a categorical treatment in the Claims Grade rubric rather than an arithmetic one.
Two companies with identical Claims % can therefore carry entirely different structural risk. The number is the beginning of the analysis, not the end of it.
CEBE mNAV is market capitalization divided by the value of the common equity Bitcoin position, the premium the market pays per unit of net per share exposure. Cycle mNAV is the forward version of the same multiple, adjusted for the wrapper. It compounds the annual cost of the capital structure, dividends, debt service, compensation, net of operating income, across the cycle window, so that a company burning capital to maintain its wrapper faces a multi year hill built into its multiple. A premium that looks identical to a cheaper company's premium at spot is not identical forward, because one of them must outgrow its own wrapper inflation just to stand still. CEBE Implied P/E divides the premium by the demonstrated CEBE growth rate, expressing the price of the stock in years of the engine's measured output. It prices the debate between snapshot and trajectory without resolving it, which is the correct amount of resolving for a measurement site to do.
None of this is a new invention, and it is not borrowed either. Price to book is what you get when you price equity against what remains after liabilities, which is the oldest equity question there is. CEBE mNAV is not a variant picked from a menu of multiples. It is the metric that emerges when you measure the claimant's residual correctly, and traditional finance already had a name for the result. It is price to book derived from first principles for a Bitcoin treasury, where two things book gets wrong actually move the answer. Book carries claims at par and carrying value, while CEBE strips them at real liquidation seniority. Book carries Bitcoin at cost or the lower of cost and fair value, while CEBE marks it at fair value. The two coincide exactly when the claims are simple, no preferred off par, no convert optionality, debt at face, which is the tell that book price to book is the frictionless special case and the claims aware version is the general one.
The same logic extends to the share count. An analyst who wants to weight convertible instruments by their proximity to conversion, between basic and fully diluted, is doing on the denominator what Adjusted Claims % does on the claims line. That proximity weighted share count is a valuation layer extension, and it is defined with the moneyness bands in the Claims Grade rubric, not in the measurement.
One concession is owed and gladly paid. For enterprise questions, credit analysis, acquisition framing, cross company enterprise comparisons, an EV construction is the right tool, and this site does not pretend otherwise. Metrics answer questions, and the honest taxonomy is a matrix, the question on one axis and the capital structure on the other, rather than a tree that assigns each company one number. The equity seat question exists for every company. So does the enterprise question. They are different questions, and a metric that answers one is not wrong for declining to answer the other.
A note on vocabulary, offered without heat. As of this writing, the sector uses the word amplification in at least three incompatible senses, a claims to reserve ratio, a leverage multiplier on net ownership, and dilution free Bitcoin growth. This site uses Claims % for the ratio and states the formula wherever a multiple appears, on the view that a metric label without a stated formula is a genre, not a number.
Every figure traces to a primary source, an SEC or exchange filing, a regulatory notification, or a company document, and carries a VERIFIED or EST flag. Estimated figures are labeled until a filing confirms them. Footnotes report deployed capital and announcements report raised capital, and the two are never conflated. Snapshots state their date, their BTC price, and their share count basis. Live displays use live prices. Historical comparisons that require a constant price say so explicitly and use one stated normalization price, never on live panels.
When an issuer publishes its own per share or multiple metric with its formula shown, this site reconciles it against verified filing data and publishes the reconciliation, agreement and divergence alike. Issuers that show their work make the whole sector more measurable, and the reconciliations are how convergence gets documented instead of asserted.
CEBE is not an enterprise value metric, and cannot price a takeover. It is not a prediction, and no scenario built on top of it inherits the measurement's authority. It is not a verdict on whether any premium is worth paying, only the denominator that makes the question precise. And it is not finished. The rubric publishes its priors so they can be calibrated against observed conversions, the moneyness bands are open for challenge, and every rule on this page is stated in public so that being wrong is cheap to discover and expensive to hide.
The standard is the point. Companies will keep shipping metrics, and the metrics will keep disagreeing, and that is fine, provided somewhere keeps the books in one consistent set of rules. This page is the rules.
CEBE Framework by @chcbearsfan. cebetracker.io.