Trump-led American Bitcoin resorts to reverse stock split to escape Nasdaq delisting

American Bitcoin Corp. (NASDAQ: ABTC) has announced it is conducting a reverse stock split, which will be effective July 2, 2026. The Trump-backed firm effectively entered crisis management mode to avoid getting delisted from Nasdaq after its shares fell below the admittance threshold.

The firm joins a growing list of publicly traded Bitcoin treasury companies that have been forced to take similar action to remain on the exchange.

When did the ABTC stock collapse?

American Bitcoin went public through a reverse merger with Gryphon Digital Mining and reached a post-IPO high of $14.65. However, that peak price is about a tiny dot in the rearview mirror now as the unit price of each token has declined by over 95% since then. 

The news of the stock adjustment triggered another ~8% dip on the day, with the ABTC stock currently trading in the $0.60 to $0.69 range.

The company reported a net loss of nearly $82 million during Q1 2026, which was a 37% increase from the $59.4 million loss posted in Q4 2025. Its CEO, Mike Ho, stated that most of the damage came from non-cash mark-to-market charges tied to Bitcoin’s quarterly price decline.

American Bitcoin currently holds 7,500 BTC according to BitcoinTreasuries.net data. The firm added more than 1,600 BTC to its treasury during Q1 and increased the capacity of its mining fleet to around 90,000 rigs after it purchased 11,298 ASIC miners for deployment at its Drumheller facility in Alberta, Canada.

Nasdaq requires that listed companies maintain a minimum bid price of $1.00 per share. The reverse stock split helps ABTC to stay compliant as it consolidates existing shares to push the per-share price above the threshold artificially, without changing the company’s underlying value.

Is this a pattern across BTC treasury firms?

American Bitcoin is not alone in the reverse stock split lane, as a couple of BTC treasury firms have also resorted to the same play to stay on the Nasdaq. 

One of them is Nakamoto (NASDAQ: NAKA), the Bitcoin treasury firm led by David Bailey. The firm executed a 1-for-40 reverse stock split in May after its shares collapsed to $0.15. 

Nakamoto’s outstanding shares dropped from around 696 million to about 17.4 million, producing a split-adjusted price near $6.32.

The company had received a delisting notice from Nasdaq in December 2025 after its stock fell below the set minimum.

In January 2026, Nasdaq sent a deficiency notice to K Wave Media for failing to maintain the exchange’s $50 million minimum market value of listed securities. 

The shares of the South Korean firm, which pivoted to a digital asset treasury, fell to around $0.45 from 2025 highs, and it was given 180 days to restore compliance.

Nasdaq did not give Digital Currency X Technology (DCX) the standard grace period because the firm had already performed multiple reverse splits in the past two years.

Do reverse splits fix the problem?

According to CoinShares investment analyst Satish Patel, however, most firms post negative returns in the six to 12 months following a split because the companies executing them are usually in financial distress. The analyst stated that it sends the same signal to the market.

Citigroup executed a 1-for-10 reverse split in 2011 at around $4.50 and saw its shares fall to $3 within months. AIG’s 1-for-20 split in 2009 failed to stop its decline. RadioShack completed a 1-for-10 split in 2013 and filed for bankruptcy two years later. 

Basically, a company does not pull the reverse stock split lever because it is in a good place. It is sort of a last resort that gets interpreted as such by markets.

The split will preserve American Bitcoin’s access to public capital markets, which is very important for a firm that is currently running at a major quarterly loss. Its parent company, Hut 8, holds an 80% stake and has hinted that Bitcoin is no longer a long-term focus for its own operations, with plans to gradually reduce its roughly 13,696 BTC holdings.

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