Empery Digital is facing pressure from a 9.8% shareholder to liquidate its 4,081 Bitcoin holdings, return capital to investors and remove chief executive Ryan Lane along with the entire board.
In a letter to directors, investor Tice P. Brown said management had entrenched itself at shareholders’ expense and revealed the company privately offered to repurchase his shares at 100% of market net asset value, which he described as “a large premium to prevailing market valuations.”
Empery Digital rejected the claims, stating that Brown “continues to misrepresent and distort the facts to further his self-serving campaign,” and adding that “Management attempted to reach an agreement with Mr. Brown as it believed such an agreement would be in the best interests of the Company and all its shareholders.”
The dispute threatens to upend Empery’s Bitcoin-centric strategy, which centres on accumulating and holding BTC as its principal asset and positioning the firm as a listed Bitcoin aggregator.
Formerly known as Volcon, the company pivoted in mid-2025 from producing electric off-road vehicles to adopting a Bitcoin treasury model, and it now ranks among the top 25 publicly traded corporate holders of Bitcoin.
Analysts at Standard Chartered have warned that the sustainability of crypto treasury companies depends on maintaining a premium to their underlying Bitcoin holdings, a metric measured by market net asset value that has become harder to defend as crypto prices retrace and sector equity valuations compress.
At the time of reporting, Bitcoin price was $66,044.56.