Crypto's hottest new trend: publicly traded companies buying bunches of
bitcoin
[June 10, 2025] By
ALAN SUDERMAN
It’s one of crypto’s hottest trends: publicly traded companies buying
bitcoin and then buying even more.
President Donald Trump’s media company just announced a plan to raise
$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.
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Donald Trump speaks at the Bitcoin 2024 Conference July 27,
2024, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File)
 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.
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