BTC ‘treasuries’ abound as firms ape Saylor’s Strategy

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BTC ‘treasuries’ are all the rage as public companies with little to no revenue look for ways to artificially inflate their depressed share prices.

• Strategy’s latest BTC buy its smallest in months
• Metaplanet buying binge attracts short sellers
• TMTG raises $2.4 billion thanks to Saylor
• Dr. Bitcoin will see you now
• ETH O.G. hops on treasury bandwagon
• History repeating itself as tragedy and farce

On June 2, Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) (NASDAQ: MSTR) announced the latest additions to its BTC treasury. The company spent $74.6 million buying 705 BTC tokens, boosting its total BTC stash to 580,995 tokens worth over $60 billion.

While Strategy has acquired additional BTC nearly every week this year, its latest acquisition is the lowest since mid-March, when the company added just 130 tokens to its haul. It’s also a fraction of the 4,020 BTC that Strategy acquired last week and the 7,390 it acquired the week before that.

Last week, Strategy founder Michael Saylor made his traditional appearances at the annual BTC conference in Las Vegas, including a presentation on 21 Ways to Wealth. Saylor claimed BTC was “engineered to outperform everything” and rank-and-file investors should get on board because BTC was not just for “multi-billion-dollar companies” like his own.

(Saylor is likely all too aware of tanking retail interest in Bitcoin, as evidenced by Google Trends data showing search levels about where they were in the depths of the calamitous ‘crypto winter’ in late-2022. Basically, if it wasn’t for multi-billion-dollar companies like Saylor’s, BTC’s price would be in the doghouse.) 

Saylor urged everyone to convert all non-BTC assets to BTC, including “inferior equity” and “inferior real estate property.” This marks a return to his infamous  2021 comments that everyone needed to mortgage their homes to buy BTC. (While Saylor has mortgaged his reputation on his BTC strategy, we’ve yet to see evidence that he’s mortgaged his own properties to personally buy more BTC.)

Ironically, BTC’s price stood at nearly $109,000 on the morning of Saylor’s speech but finished the day struggling to stay over $106,000. By Monday morning, the price was struggling to stay above $104,000, which could leave many rank-and-file investors wondering if Saylor’s speech should be retitled 21 Ways to Insolvency.

Since embarking on its BTC treasury plan, MSTR shares have traded at a multiple of the assets in its treasury (revenue from MSTR’s data analytics business is now a rounding error). But that premium has halved since its peak last November in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s re-election as U.S. president.

That decline is partly due to growing publicity over the unwarranted premium that investors are paying to hold BTC via MSTR (which technically doesn’t entitle shareholders to a claim on the BTC underpinning MSTR’s price). But it’s also due to the ever-increasing parade of MSTR clones that are gleefully hopping on Saylor’s BTC bandwagon and diluting his unique selling point.

Metaplanet’s out-of-this-world premium

While Saylor was trumpeting Strategy’s latest buy, Japanese investment firm Metaplanet (JPX: 3350.T) announced the addition of 1,088 BTC to its own treasury at a cost of $118 million, bringing its total haul to 8,888 tokens. This makes Metaplanet the eighth-largest BTC holder, leapfrogging Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital and Jack Dorsey’s Block (NASDAQ: SQ).

Like Strategy, Metaplanet is financing its BTC buys with borrowed cash and aims to continue raising funds to boost its treasury above 10,000 tokens by year’s end. Metaplanet is launching a new U.S. subsidiary (Metaplanet Treasury) that aims to raise $250 million by tapping into “deep institutional liquidity pools and more efficient Bitcoin acquisition channels.”

Unlike Strategy, which saw only a minor bump on news of Monday’s buy, Metaplanet’s shares shot up nearly 10% by the close of Monday’s trading in Tokyo. Metaplanet’s shares were already trading at a ~5x premium to BTC’s fiat value, making it a curious choice for investors who are almost certainly not interested in Metaplanet’s hotel management business (although the company is in the process of rebranding the Royal Oak Gotanada hotel in Tokyo as ‘The Bitcoin Hotel.’)

Metaplanet was one of Japan’s most-shorted stocks in April, back when the share price was a mere $400 or thereabouts. The shares are now trading around 3x that figure, leading to short-selling pain, but it remains to be seen who will have the last laugh.

Famed short-seller James Chanos revealed last month that he was shorting MSTR while buying BTC directly. Chanos slammed MSTR and its growing number of “ridiculous” copycats for “buying something for $1, selling it for $2.50.”

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TMTG in the money

On May 30, Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) announced that it had closed its previously announced private placement offering, raising $2.44 billion from “approximately 50 institutional investors.” The net proceeds of $2.32 billion will be used “to create a Bitcoin treasury and for other general corporate purposes and working capital.”

Speaking at last week’s BTC Vegas conference, TMTG exec VP (and son of Donald) Eric Trump recalled Saylor urging the Trumps to take out a $2 billion mortgage on their Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to buy BTC.

While the Trumps ultimately chose a different path to raise funds, Eric called Saylor’s advice notable, saying it was rare to have “the titan of the industry that’s literally advocating for smart people to compete against them.” Either that, or Saylor is all too aware that he can’t keep this artificially inflated balloon aloft all by himself forever.

In a subsequent conversation with CNBC, Saylor said he was “really very pleasantly surprised” by TMTG’s borrowing-to-buy BTC announcement. Saylor called it “an incredible, courageous, aggressive and intelligent move” on TMTG’s part.

TMTG says its $2.4 billion raise will make the company “one of the top Bitcoin holders among publicly-traded U.S. firms.” Possibly, but the markets appeared thoroughly underwhelmed, with TMTG’s shares closing Monday’s trading effectively unchanged from their opening price. The impact of the cash raise was likely priced in, although the sheer number of firms adopting the treasury model means the bloom may be well and truly off this rose.

Like many other ‘treasury’ firms, TMTG generates inconsequential revenue from its primary business (in TMTG’s case, selling ads on the Truth Social platform). TMTG generated revenue of just $3.6 million last year and just $821,000 in the first quarter of 2025, while continuing to rack up tens of millions in quarterly losses.

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Kindly buy our shares

Given the aforementioned premiums to the companies’ underlying assets, it’s hard to see why investors have been so gung-ho about plowing money into these companies rather than just buying BTC directly. Conversely, it’s not hard to see why these companies are interested in hitching their cobweb-covered wagons to this new engine of irrational exuberance.

KindlyMD CEO Tim Pickett told CNBC that the merger represented “a strategic leap” for his company. While Pickett insists that the company isn’t totally giving up on its healthcare ambitions, Bailey boldly predicted that “what KindlyMD will look like in the future will be different than what it looks like today.”

There are now over 100 public companies that have made the decision to add some BTC to their balance sheets, but there are some notable resisters, most of which have a viable non-BTC business model.

On May 28, Meta (NASDAQ: META) shareholders voted 99% against a proposal for the company to use a portion of its $70+ billion in cash to build a Bitcoin treasury. In January,  Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) shareholders overwhelmingly rejected a similar proposal despite Saylor personally giving a three-minute pitch on the proposal’s merits.

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Online gambling affiliate pins survival on ETH treasury

While all the attention is on BTC treasuries, a struggling online gambling affiliate marketer is going rogue by launching a treasury based on the Ethereum network’s native token ETH.

On May 27, SharpLink Gaming (NASDAQ: SBET) announced plans to raise $425 million as part of its ‘Ethereum Treasury Strategy,’ for which “ETH will serve as the Company’s primary treasury reserve asset.” Lead investor on the raise is blockchain software firm Consensys, whose CEO Joseph Lubin (an Ethereum Foundation co-founder) will now head up SharpLink’s board of directors.

Lubin told Bloomberg the company isn’t done raising funds but future raises would be done “in a prudent way” without “excessive risk.” And while ETH has failed to match BTC’s inflated value—ETH enjoyed a post-election bounce to $4,000 but currently sits around $2,600—Lubin said he anticipates ETH “growing enormously valuable” in the coming years.

Lubin credited a dinner he had with Saylor six months ago for convincing him to steer SharpLink in ETH’s direction, telling Bloomberg “we don’t see anything overly dangerous in the strategy.”

That’s in part because SharpLink was already in a great deal of fiscal danger. At one point in 2021, as America continued to relax its former online gambling and sports betting restrictions, SharpLink’s shares were worth over $1,100. But since then there’s been a steady and seemingly permanent erosion of investor interest.

In 2023, SharpLink lost $14.2 million. In 2024, SharpLink’s net income topped $10 million, but that was only due to a $14.5 million boost from the sale of one of its operating units. Last July, SharpLink announced a review process “to evaluate strategic alternatives for the Company, including, but not limited to, a sale, merger, strategic business combination or other transaction.” 

That same month, NASDAQ warned SharpLink that it was in danger of being delisted due to its failure to maintain a minimum share price and maintain minimum stockholders’ equity. In March, NASDAQ gave SharpLink an extension until May 23 to remedy its problems. Seems they found the solution just in time.

SharpLink shares, which had been trading below $4 most of this year, shot up to $35 on word of the ETH plan, then shot up to nearly $80 a few days later. The shares have since surrendered some of those gains, closing Monday down nearly 28% and sinking another 5% in after-hours trading to $52.56.

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Doomed to repeat it

If all of this sounds distressingly familiar, it should. In 2017, a New York beverage maker changed their name from Long Island Iced Tea to Long Blockchain Corp and its stock jumped 200% in a single day. The NASDAQ exchange delisted the company in 2018, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) revoked registration of its shares in 2021.

Also in 2017, shares of a British firm called On-line Plc jumped nearly 400% the day after it announced its new identity as On-line Blockchain Plc. The company was deleted from the FTSE AIM All-Share Index in January 2024.

A 2019 study of 10 companies that added ‘blockchain‘ to their names found that the ‘abnormal positive return’ tended to last about two months, but the returns turned negative within five months of the brand revamp. 

But this gambit isn’t limited to crypto-specific disguises. In 1998, the legendary 1970s record label/kitchen-gadget-promoter K-Tel International was on the financial ropes. Then, in the middle of the dot-com boom, the company announced plans to launch a digital operation called K-Tel.com.

K-Tel’s stock price shot up 10x in a month but it wasn’t always clear that the company was as interested in building a functional website as it was in selling its inflated shares. Either way, the euphoria faded and before the year was through, NASDAQ was threatening to delist the stock for failing to meet minimum market cap requirements. 

As one analyst said at the time about many of the dot-com hucksters: “I’m not suggesting there’s nothing to them. It’s a gigantic change in this time where we’re all going to be viewing things and buying things differently. But, at the same time, there are a lot of interlopers and there are a lot of pretenders that are on the coattails of this great Internet change.”

Here endeth the lesson.

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