A business can look stronger and weaker at the same time, depending on which truth you choose to count. Here, we watch Metaplanet forecast higher operating profit even as a falling Bitcoin price turns its balance sheet into a mirror of uncertainty.
You feel the tension immediately, don’t you. A firm can “earn” more and still “lose” more, simply because the world repriced the thing it chose to hold.
Metaplanet, the largest Bitcoin treasury company in Japan, is telling you its operating profit should rise by eighty one percent in twenty twenty six. That confidence comes after a prior year where operating profit multiplied roughly seventeen times, pushed upward by premiums earned from writing options. Not from building a new factory. Not from discovering a new product. From selling time and volatility to someone else.
Look closer and the structure appears. The company held thirty five thousand one hundred two Bitcoin, and it reported operating profit of six point two nine billion yen in the prior year. Option writing premiums rose to seven point nine eight billion yen, up from six hundred ninety one million yen the year before that. Revenue followed, climbing to eight point nine billion yen. In other words, the cash like inflow came from a market that was willing to pay for protection, or pay for leverage, or pay for a story about tomorrow.
But then the other truth arrived, quietly, like gravity. Bitcoin fell from a near one hundred twenty five thousand dollars high to finish the year below ninety thousand dollars. And with that drop, Metaplanet recorded a non cash valuation loss of one hundred two point two billion yen, pulling net income down into a loss of ninety five billion yen.
Here is the paradox we need you to sit with. Operating profit can rise while net income collapses, because one is about the flow of today’s activity, and the other is about the market’s latest verdict on what you already own.
Micro hook: when a company says “non cash,” do you hear “not real” or do you hear “not settled yet”?
Metaplanet is still holding more than two point four billion dollars worth of Bitcoin, and it expects nearly all of its twenty twenty six revenue to come from those holdings. That sentence matters. It tells you the firm is not merely using Bitcoin as a reserve. It is allowing Bitcoin to become the engine, the identity, and the primary source of future receipts.
And yet, the market does not care about identity. It cares about price. With Bitcoin around sixty eight thousand five hundred fifty dollars, the company is sitting on roughly one point two billion dollars in unrealized losses. Not realized, yes. But still a signal. Still information. Still a reminder that time preference cuts both ways: you can wait out the storm, but you cannot pretend the storm is not there.
Micro hook: what is a treasury strategy, if not a bet on which kind of uncertainty you can survive?
For twenty twenty six, the company expects revenue to grow by almost eighty percent to sixteen billion yen, and operating profit to reach eleven point four billion yen. The shares edged up slightly to three hundred twenty six yen.
So we end in a place that feels uncomfortable, because it is honest. Metaplanet is learning what every Bitcoin holder learns, just at corporate scale: you can harvest premiums from volatility, and still be judged by the underlying you chose to marry. If this tension lands in you, hold it for a moment and ask yourself which number you would trust more in your own life the cash you can touch today, or the value the market might grant you tomorrow.