Metaplanet (TYO: 3350) has reversed a large part of its executive equity package after investors objected to how much dilution the awards could create. The Tokyo-listed bitcoin treasury company said its board approved another rewrite of the Series 10 stock acquisition rights, shrinking the pool of shares those rights can produce and dropping an earlier plan to recycle leftover warrants into a staff incentive scheme.
The awards were originally structured so the number of underlying shares could grow with the company’s fully diluted share count.
That formula made sense when Metaplanet was a smaller, struggling business. After it adopted a bitcoin-treasury strategy and repeatedly sold stock to buy the asset, the same formula turned a modest grant into a much larger claim.
By mid-2026 the potential share total had climbed to about 319.5 million.
Management froze further automatic growth in August, but many holders still wanted a rollback of the expansion that had already occurred.
The new terms cut the conversion ratio from 696 shares per right to 410, roughly the level that applied before a September 2025 international offering.
That reduces the overall pool by about 41 percent, to roughly 188.2 million potential shares.
After subtracting awards already exercised, the remaining unexercised claim falls by about 55.5 percent, to around 105.4 million shares.
Shares already issued through earlier exercises will not be cancelled; the cut is applied to what holders can still receive.
The exercise price stays at 10 yen per share, and the lock-up on shares obtained through the program still runs until August 2031.Unvested rights now vest in three equal parts that become exercisable in 2029, 2030 and 2031.
The company also cancelled a previously announced transfer of up to 90,000 rights into a long-term officer and employee incentive vehicle.
It said it will work with an outside compensation adviser on a new plan instead.
Chief executive Simon Gerovich, who recused himself from the board vote as a holder of the rights, said the revision extinguishes more than $220 million of warrant value and lifts bitcoin per fully diluted share by about 8.8 percent without the company buying additional coins.
He has argued that the original floating structure was never meant to reward capital raises that did little to raise bitcoin per share.
The company still holds about 43,000 bitcoin.
The concession does not unwind every earlier gain.
Gerovich previously exercised a portion of his rights in late August and received tens of millions of shares, which remain outstanding under the lock-up.
Some investors had pressed for a deeper cut, closer to the original size of the plan.
Analysts who follow bitcoin treasury stocks have described the latest move as a meaningful alignment with outside shareholders, while noting that a multi-year overhang of unexercised rights remains.
The episode highlights a tension common to companies that fund bitcoin purchases with equity: growth in the treasury can look impressive in headline terms while still leaving per-share holders worse off if compensation formulas scale automatically with issuance.
Metaplanet’s latest filing tries to draw a brighter line between accretive and non-accretive dilution. Now whether or not that restores confidence will depend on how the stock and the bitcoin-per-share metric behave from here, and on whether a replacement employee plan is designed with clearer limits.