Crypto’s hottest new trend: Publicly traded companies buying bunches of bitcoin

Donald Trump speaks at the Bitcoin 2024 Conference July 27, 2024, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File)

It’s one of crypto’s hottest trends: publicly traded companies buying bitcoin and then buying even more.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s media company just announced a plan to raise US$2.5 billion to buy bitcoin, joining a growing number of so-called “bitcoin treasury companies” as the world’s most popular cryptocurrency hits all-time highs.

The companies buy bitcoin for different reasons: Some hold it as a hedge against inflation or to signal support for the cryptocurrency industry, while some firms have made using debt and stock sales to buy bitcoin their primary business strategy.

“The world at large has no idea what’s happening and they’re in for a big shock,” Dylan LeClair, an executive at the Japan-based Metaplanet, which recently went from being a budget hotel firm to a bitcoin treasury company, said at a recent crypto conference. “This is a one-way train, nothing is going to stop this.”

The massive increases in some firms’ stock price may seem to validate LeClair’s bravado, but there are plenty of warnings that a downturn in bitcoin’s prices could lead to large selloffs.

Here’s a look at bitcoin treasury companies by the numbers:

582,000

That’s how many bitcoins owned by MicroStrategy – the undisputed goliath of bitcoin treasury companies.

With nearly 3% of the total bitcoin supply, MicroStrategy owns more bitcoins than every other bitcoin treasury company combined. It also owns more bitcoin than every nation state combined, according to the tracking site bitcointreasuries.net.

Now called Strategy, the software company first started buying bitcoin in 2020 with reserve cash. Now, its software business is a small part of a perpetual bitcoin-buying machine that uses a variety of strategies – like selling shares or issuing debt – to keep growing its bitcoin holdings.

More than 3000%

That’s how much MicroStrategy’s stock price has increased in the last five years, compared to around 1,000% gain in bitcoin and the 1,500% jump for chipmaker and stock market darling Nvidia during that same period.

The company’s success has boosted the profile of MicroStrategy’s founder and chairman, Michael Saylor, who has visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and the White House while becoming bitcoin’s enigmatic high priest.

“Bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth, exponentially growing ever smarter, faster, and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy,” Saylor said in a social media post.

Saylor’s success has also spawned many imitators.

“It’s kind of shocking … that it took someone four years after Michael Saylor started doing it to finally do it and pull the trigger and now it feels like everyone’s pulling the trigger,” said Eric Semler, the chairman of Semler Scientific, a healthcare company that started acquiring bitcoin last year.

$90,000

That’s the average purchase price of bitcoin for half of the 61 publicly traded bitcoin strategy companies, excluding bitcoin mining companies and bitcoin exchange-traded funds, according to a recent analysis by Standard Chartered.

Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s head of digital assets research, said in the report that restrictions on investors buying bitcoin directly help explain the popularity of bitcoin treasury companies, as their stocks can serve as bitcoin proxies. But as crypto becomes more mainstream, the case for investing in bitcoin treasury companies becomes weaker, Kendrick said.

He added that bitcoin’s volatility could force some newer bitcoin treasury companies to sell their holdings to satisfy their debts if it falls under the purchase price.

“The question then becomes, how much pain can companies withstand before being forced to sell their BTC?” Kendrick said, referring to the symbol for bitcoin.

Triple digits

That’s how much of a one-day percentage increase in stock prices firms have seen after recently announcing plans to hold other types of cryptocurrencies as corporate treasuries, highlighting how the appetite for such companies extends beyond bitcoin.

SharpLink Gaming, a gambling marketing firm, saw its share price increase by more than 400% after it announced plans to buy up to $425 million in Ethereum, the second most popular form of cryptocurrency. And crypto firm Upexi saw its stock price soar more than 300% after it announced plans to buy $100 million of Solana, a cryptocurrency popular in the meme coin ecosystem.

Alan Suderman, The Associated Press