Avalanche Treasury Co. debuts on Nasdaq with a 16% slide down the slope 🏔️

Avalanche Treasury Co. began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker AVAT on Thursday and closed 16% below its opening price, finishing at $1.85 after opening at $2.20, according to Google Finance. The company reached the public market by merging with special-purpose acquisition company Mountain Lake Acquisition in a $675 million deal first announced in October. The transaction was backed by Dragonfly, Pantera, ParaFi Capital, VanEck, Galaxy Digital and Kraken, and is structured to give public-market investors exposure to the Avalanche blockchain ecosystem without directly holding the underlying token. Bart Smith, CEO of Avalanche Treasury and a former Susquehanna executive, said Thursday the company "represents meaningful potential for the repositioning of institutional finance" and framed the listing as a structural bet rather than a directional call on price.

Avalanche launched in 2020 with a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, high throughput and a multi-chain architecture, and now hosts more than 550 projects, with more than $1 billion in institutional funds deployed and more than $1.65 billion in real-world assets tokenized on the network. AVAX, the network's native token, gained 3.4% on the day but remains down 33% over the past 30 days and 95% below its November 2021 all-time high, trading at $6.61, its lowest level since early 2021, according to TradingView.

The debut comes as publicly listed digital asset treasuries (DATs) face pressure across the board. Weekly net inflows into BTC-focused treasuries have fallen to roughly $266 million this week, down from peaks above $2 billion in April and May, per Coinglass. Strategy, the largest BTC treasury, has seen its stock drop 69% over the past 12 months amid the deepening Bitcoin bear market. Bitmine Immersion Technologies pivoted from BTC mining to an Ethereum treasury in mid-2025; its shares, traded as BMNR, hit an all-time high of $135 in July 2025 before falling 88% to $16.50 a year later. SOL Strategies Inc., a Solana-focused DAT that began trading in September 2025 under the ticker STKE, has seen its share price decline 92% over the past 12 months.