Warnings emerge as companies pile into bitcoin
Agencies
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: 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.
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.
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.
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