The coin-treasury trade is unwinding: two firms sold, one got licensed

Selling the coins

KULR Technology Group's third quarter filing reads like a closing statement on the bitcoin treasury era. The company completed its exit from bitcoin, selling 1,099.09 bitcoin for net proceeds of approximately 80.1 million dollars, according to its filing, and used a portion of the proceeds to repay in full the $20.0 million loan outstanding under its Coinbase credit facility. As of September 30, 2026, KULR had 54.5 million dollars in cash, no outstanding borrowings, and no digital assets. The balance sheet that once held bitcoin now holds cash and nothing else, and the company says it expects research and development expenses to decrease beginning in the fourth quarter and further in 2027. m:…4041

The operating business underneath is smaller than the headlines suggest, and the filing is honest about that. KULR reported third-quarter revenue of 7.4 million dollars, a 197% increase year over year, with product sales of 6.49 million dollars, up 299% from the same period last year. Net income was 4.47 million dollars, but that was driven by a 15.8 million dollar non-recurring gain on digital assets, and gross margin was 4%, down from 17% a year earlier. The company also implemented a November 2026 reduction in force expected to generate approximately 4 million dollars in annualized cost savings, and says it built an NDAA-compliant battery supply chain for autonomous systems, with a production ramp expected in 2027. Read straight, the quarter says the bitcoin sale paid the bills and the battery business has to carry the company now. m:…4041

A miner follows the same path

Canaan, the bitcoin mining hardware maker, told a similar story on its earnings call. The company reported total revenue of 14.5 million dollars for the third quarter of 2026 and net income of 8.0 million dollars, and it generated 40 million dollars in cash from the sale of ether and a portion of its bitcoin holdings. It is shifting its long-term focus toward energy and AI high-performance computing infrastructure, and mining equipment demand remains very weak, according to chief executive Nangeng Zhang. The miner is not abandoning its old business in a single quarter, but the direction is plain: the coins are being converted to cash, and the cash is pointed at power and computing. m:…9961

The details of the pivot are concrete. The Duval County, Texas project received a conditional Studied Load - Firm classification under the ERCOT Batch Zero process, and Canaan is advancing a second 1 gigawatt power project in Zapata County, Texas. It also operates an 8-megawatt district heating project in Northern Europe that serves 2,800 households. The company expects fourth-quarter revenue of between 18 million and 22 million dollars, and plans a 1-for-25 reverse ADS split on December 4, 2026. A reverse split is usually a sign a company wants its share price higher, and a power project is usually a sign it wants a different business. Canaan is doing both at once. m:…9961

The regulated side grows

While the treasury holders were selling, the infrastructure firms were getting licensed. UAB DriveWealth Europe has been authorized by the Bank of Lithuania as a crypto-asset service provider under MiCA, building on its existing MiFID II licence, and its crypto-asset services will become available within the new year. DriveWealth provides infrastructure for US equities, ETFs, mutual funds, fixed income, and options, and it is building out infrastructure to support crypto-asset services in phases. The company has a partnership with Ripple for RLUSD stablecoin settlement, cross-border payments, and digital asset custody. The shape of the business is the tell: a regulated broker adding crypto as one more asset class, rather than a crypto firm trying to become a broker. m:…9724

The plumbing is consolidating too. Kaiko completed the integration of Amberdata into its platform on November 1, 2026, five months after acquiring Amberdata in June, and now covers 175 exchanges, including 8 added through the integration, more than 13,000 digital assets, and 18 blockchains. The integration adds more than 50 new endpoints for market data and analytics. Put the four stories together and the pattern is hard to miss: the speculative part of crypto, holding coins on a corporate balance sheet, is shrinking, while the boring part, licences, data, custody, and settlement, is growing. That is usually what an industry looks like after the trade that defined it stops working. m:…0688