Metaplanet Cuts Series 10 Share Pool by 41% and Scraps Employee Warrant Plan After Shareholder Backlash
For a few days in early September, Simon Gerovich’s timeline looked different than usual. Instead of the celebratory bitcoin-purchase updates that have defined Metaplanet’s public image for the past two years, the CEO found himself fielding a blunter kind of question from his own shareholders — one investor put it to him directly on X, asking whether he was “rolling back the shares from the anti-dilution clause in the 10th series or not,” adding, “that’s all we want to know.”
coin680 covered the freeze that triggered that pressure on September 10, when Metaplanet paused roughly 319 million shares tied to its Series 10 stock acquisition rights after shareholders began questioning how much dilution the structure could ultimately produce. The mechanism at the center of the complaint was unusual: the number of shares owed under each right increased automatically every time Metaplanet issued new stock to fund additional bitcoin purchases, meaning the company’s own capital-raising activity kept expanding the potential payout to rights holders at existing shareholders’ expense.
On September 11, Gerovich answered. Metaplanet is cutting the number of shares that could ultimately be issued under Series 10 by 131.3 million — a 41.1% reduction that brings the maximum potential share count down from 319.464 million to 188.19 million. Structurally, the change resets the conversion ratio tied to each right from 1-to-696 back down to 1-to-410, which is roughly where it stood before Metaplanet’s September 2025 international share offering pushed the ratio higher in the first place. The exercise price itself stays fixed at 10 yen per share, and shares acquired through the rights remain locked up until August 2031.
Metaplanet went a step further than simply trimming the number. The company also scrapped a related plan that would have funneled up to 90,000 of the unexercised rights into a long-term incentive pool for officers and employees — the piece of the original structure that had drawn some of the sharpest shareholder criticism, since it effectively gave insiders an additional claim on the same dilution pool. In its place, Metaplanet says it will build a new compensation program with the help of an outside global compensation consultant, rather than reviving the warrant-based approach.
The numbers behind the reversal are meant to reassure, not just apologize. Metaplanet says the cut extinguishes more than $220 million in warrant value that would otherwise have gone to rights holders, and raises the company’s bitcoin holdings per fully diluted share by roughly 8.8% — the metric long-term Metaplanet shareholders track most closely, since it captures how much bitcoin exposure each share actually represents once every convertible instrument is accounted for. The remaining, smaller pool of rights will still become exercisable, but in three separate stages running from 2029 through 2031 rather than all at once.
Note: the embedded post above predates Metaplanet’s September 11 response and is included as direct evidence of the shareholder pressure the company was responding to, not as coverage of the announcement itself.
Metaplanet’s business model is built around leveraged exposure to bitcoin’s price, and changes to its share structure do not eliminate the underlying volatility risk for shareholders. This is not financial advice — do your own research before making any investment decisions.
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