VanEck hands Metaplanet the only "Bad" exec-pay grade in Bitcoin-treasury top 10 🌰

Asset manager VanEck has labeled Metaplanet's executive compensation structure "Bad," the only company among the 10 largest digital asset treasury companies to fall into its lowest category. In a Friday report, VanEck cited an equity plan equal to 14.7% of fully diluted shares and officer exposure of 8.2% at the Japanese Bitcoin treasury company, describing both figures as far out of step with peers. VanEck said Metaplanet's officer exposure is roughly 10 times the 0.8% average of the other nine companies analyzed, while its overall equity plan is nearly four times the peer average.

By comparison, Strategy, the largest corporate $BTC holder, has an equity plan equal to 2% of fully diluted shares and officer exposure of 0.5%. VanEck rated Strategy's compensation structure "Good," noting that its equity reserve is fixed and that plan increases require a shareholder vote. Metaplanet currently ranks as the third-largest publicly traded corporate Bitcoin holder, with 43,000 BTC, according to BitcoinTreasuries.net.

VanEck said the disparity stems partly from Metaplanet's former compensation structure, which allowed its option pool to expand automatically as the company issued shares to fund Bitcoin purchases. The mechanism caused the pool to grow from 46 million shares to 319.5 million, adding roughly 273 million potential shares. In August, Metaplanet ended the automatic adjustment mechanism, and in September it cut the overall pool by 41%, from 319.5 million to 188.2 million shares. VanEck said the changes still "fall well short of the mark."

Friday's report called for Metaplanet to reverse the roughly 273 million-share expansion created by the adjustment clause and replace the remaining rights with a shareholder-approved compensation plan. VanEck separately noted that, unless past grants are clawed back, much of the dilution has already occurred. The firm also recommended tying executive compensation to a metric such as Bitcoin per fully diluted share and adopting a written grant-timing policy.