A bitcoin cash without the keys. Datavault AI lost half of its stock market value on Monday October 27. She admits to the SEC that she can no longer withdraw the bitcoins from her $150 million fundraising. BTC have been lying dormant on a wallet on the Biconomy exchange for over a year. The withdrawal request filed in June remains unanswered.
The file comes at a time when corporate treasuries are sharply slowing down their purchases of BTC. For a company that promised a supercomputer financed in bitcoin, the bill now amounts to tens of millions of dollars erased from the balance sheet.
Key Points
DVLT stock ended Monday at $0.067, down 49.6%, with eight times its usual volume.
Scilex had settled $150 million in BTC as of September 2025, or approximately 1,328 bitcoins credited off-chain at Biconomy.
Part of the lot was resold to Scilex for $40.5 million in cash. The rest has been inaccessible since the June withdrawal request.
Assets are revised downwards to $92.2 million as of December 31, 2025 and going concern is re-examined.
No explanation on the blockage, neither from Datavault nor from Biconomy.
Datavault AI: 1,328 bitcoins paid by Scilex and never left Biconomy
Back to September 25, 2025. Scilex Holding, a Nasdaq-listed pharmaceutical company, announces a $150 million strategic investment in Datavault AI. The target is a small data and acoustics company that dreams of becoming a player in tokenization. Payment is made in bitcoin, based on a price of $112,915.52 per unit, according to the Scilex press release. Or approximately 1,328.43 BTC.
In exchange, Scilex receives 15 million shares and a pre-funded warrant covering more than 263.9 million additional shares. A warrant is a right to buy shares at a price fixed in advance. Pre-financed, it is already paid for and just needs to be exercised.
The expensive detail comes next. Bitcoins have never passed through the blockchain to a wallet controlled by Datavault. They were credited by off-chain transfer to an account opened at Biconomy Pte. Ltd., a second-tier Singaporean exchange. In other words, a line in the platform's database, without a publicly verifiable transaction.
Between September 2025 and January 2026, Datavault resells a portion of these BTC to Scilex for approximately $40.5 million in cash. Then, in June 2026, the company asks Biconomy to transfer the rest to an external account. As of October 26, the withdrawal has still not been executed. The document filed with the SEC does not provide any reason.
An accounting restatement that melts Datavault’s assets
The 8-K issued on October 26 does not just report a withdrawal problem. Management recognizes that these bitcoins should never have been included in assets as available cash. They related to a subscription debt, that is to say an amount still owed by the investor, which is deducted from the equity.
The numbers cascade. Total assets are reduced by 8.1 million dollars as of September 30, 2025, by 92.2 million as of December 31, 2025. Then by 57.1 million as of March 31, 2026 and by 49 million as of June 30, 2026. The gradual decline follows both the resales to Scilex and the fall of bitcoin. BTC was worth $112,000 last fall, compared to around $81,000 this Wednesday morning according to CoinGecko.
If the initial lot were still whole, it would be worth around $107 million today. No one knows how much BTC actually remains in the Biconomy account.
Management indicates that it is reassessing the company's ability to continue its activity, without setting a date for the corrected accounts. Wall Street decided in one session. The stock closed Monday at $0.067 compared to $0.133 on Friday. Nearly 250 million shares changed hands, according to data compiled by The Block. The stock is now moving very far from the minimum dollar required by Nasdaq to remain listed.
Not your keys and not your bitcoins: the lesson for corporate treasuries
You know the saying. It was originally aimed at individuals who left their cryptos on an exchange. The collapse of FTX in November 2022 set it in stone. Datavault delivers a corporate version, with a board of directors, auditors and a file filed with the American stock market police.
Large bitcoin treasuries don't work that way. Strategy, which holds more than 840,000 BTC, entrusts its reserves to regulated custodians such as Coinbase Custody or Fidelity Digital Assets. It regularly publishes its inventory. Nothing compares to a balance credited off-chain with a Singaporean player whose reserves no one on Wall Street was tracking.
The Datavault case poses a simple question to the shareholders of the approximately two hundred companies that have adopted a bitcoin treasury strategy. Where are the keys? A balance sheet that displays BTC without a verifiable on-chain address only displays, in reality, a promise from the platform that keeps them.
