Treasury fever: The corporate crypto arms race

Corporate capital shifts from factories to bitcoin. Crypto treasury formation is replacing retail drivers, which has implications for Open Money

Since June 1, 98 companies have collectively raised over $43 billion with the express purpose of acquiring crypto assets rather than investing in traditional operations. This isn't just the realm of blockchain startups. A surprising 61 of these firms are non-crypto public companies, each seizing on the symbolic and financial promise of putting Bitcoin or Solana on their books.

This isn’t isolated. Galaxy Digital reports a surge of partnership-led capital raises totaling $4 billion, focused on helping companies pivot into digital treasury strategies.

Microstrategy’s playbook and copycats

At the center of this mania stands a familiar figure: Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy). The company holds over 400,000 BTC, worth around $23.9 billion at book value as of mid-2025. Since it began accumulating Bitcoin in 2020, its stock has surged by more than 3,000 percent, making it less a software firm and more a crypto-holding vehicle with legacy branding.

Dozens of companies have mimicked its strategy: issuing convertible debt or new equity, pledging the proceeds to buy Bitcoin or Ethereum, and riding the resulting equity rally. But unlike Strategy, most of these firms are small-cap, slow-growth players hoping a flashy crypto pivot will breathe life into otherwise stagnant narratives.

It’s the financial equivalent of strapping a rocket to a tricycle — and hoping for orbital velocity.

Ethereum enters the game: Diversification or detour?

While Bitcoin remains the gold standard of corporate crypto treasuries, Ethereum is gaining momentum. BitMine, once a minor miner, now holds over $1 billion in ETH, quadrupling its position since early 2025. It’s backed by marquee investors including Cathie Wood and Peter Thiel.

Others are following. Bit Digital recently announced a $1 billion raise to expand its ETH holdings, pitching Ethereum as a programmable hedge — more versatile than Bitcoin, with the added benefit of yield via staking.

Even the TON Foundation, best known for its Telegram affiliation, is exploring a $400 million Toncoin treasury model, seeking corporate-grade structure for what remains a speculative bet.

Is this genuine diversification — or a bet on narrative flexibility? The answer may lie in the charts and the capital markets’ reactions.

Storytelling, yield, and investor appeal

For executives and investor relations teams, crypto treasuries offer more than just balance sheet transformation. They’re storytelling machines. According to strategist Tom Lee, the benefits include inflation hedging, asset diversification, and positive market signaling — especially to millennial and Gen Z investors.

There’s also yield. Ethereum, unlike Bitcoin, can be staked to generate returns. And niche tokens, even meme-adjacent ones, have been shown to boost short-term stock prices when publicly adopted. A small firm announcing a Solana or Toncoin acquisition might enjoy a 10–30 percent rally in a day, regardless of fundamentals.

Crypto treasuries have become a cheat code: tap speculative flows, enjoy media coverage, and spark investor curiosity. But there’s a cost too.

Risk, dilution, and the bubble pheromone

There’s growing evidence that many of these firms aren’t even deploying capital into crypto — at least not immediately. A Cryptonews investigation found that some raise money under the crypto pretense but never disclose actual asset purchases, instead holding cash, using it for buybacks, or engaging in unrelated ventures.

Then there’s the looming risk: what if Bitcoin falls? Analysts warn that companies paying premiums for crypto now could see massive impairments if BTC drops below $90,000 — a level increasingly seen as a critical support for these treasury strategies.

What happens if markets crash?

Corporate crypto treasuries are essentially levered long bets on volatile assets. Several recent academic papers show that firms like Strategy have BTC-stock betas greater than 1 — meaning their equity prices move more than Bitcoin does, both up and down.

Many of these companies lack hedging strategies, liquidity buffers, or margin protocols to manage price swings. If BTC falls 30 percent, some firms may be forced to liquidate assets, restructure debt, or issue emergency equity, triggering cascading consequences across both crypto and public equity markets.

It’s a precarious feedback loop: stock prices react to Bitcoin; Bitcoin reacts to headlines; and headlines are, increasingly, being written by these very companies.

The Open Money connection

We’ve come back to this angle multiple times. A key question is whether this new kind of crypto treasury is overall good for crypto? On one hand, the increased institutional investment brings more crypto liquidity.

But it also brings more risk that when the market starts to downslide, the backpedalling could trigger a cascade of consequences that ends in the market falling apart. We’ve seen this interconnected web fall apart once before during the Luna, FTX, Three Arrows Capital debacle.

Besides the exposure, there’s an issue that building massive crypto treasury companies is just recreating the centralization and gate-keeper dynamics of Wall Street but for digital assets.

Not that long ago, crypto was created as an alternative — as a financial system based on peer-to-peer financial tooling designed to make money as open as the internet itself. Treasuries controlled by specially organized companies and backed by deep-pocketed people and firms feels like a pretty big pivot from that original vision.

What to watch next

If you are looking to track this arms race, here are a few key signals:

New capital raises: Watch Bit Digital, TON Foundation, and others announcing billion-dollar treasury strategies.
Onchain receipts: Some companies trumpet holdings but don’t publish wallet addresses or custody details. Who’s buying? Who’s bluffing?
Regulatory signals: The GENIUS Act and proposed stablecoin frameworks could impose new compliance hurdles — or unlock legitimacy for digital asset treasuries.

Transparency and timing will separate the pioneers from the pretenders.

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