The corporate Bitcoin treasury playbook, the one that turned MicroStrategy into a Wall Street darling and spawned hundreds of imitators, may be approaching its stress test. A fund manager is warning that Bitcoin could face meaningful downside pressure as the roughly $150 billion that public companies have collectively allocated to Bitcoin creates new risks the market hasn’t fully priced in.
The copycat treasury boom
Since 2025, over 200 publicly traded companies have raised approximately $150 billion to buy Bitcoin for their corporate treasuries. The model was pioneered by Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, led by Michael Saylor, who became the de facto evangelist for treating Bitcoin as a corporate reserve asset.
The pitch was simple. Cash loses value to inflation, Bitcoin appreciates over time, so why not swap one for the other on your balance sheet? Companies raised capital through equity offerings and convertible debt to fund their purchases, and for a while, it worked beautifully.
Investors rewarded these firms with premium valuations, stock prices that exceeded the value of their underlying Bitcoin holdings. That premium, in turn, made it easy to issue more equity at favorable prices and buy even more Bitcoin.
