The Rundown - Deep Dive: 3 Stocks Betting Everything on Crypto Treasuries

Episode Date: August 17, 2025

Crypto treasury companies are suddenly one of the hottest trends on Wall Street. We explain how Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy created the model and why new players like BitMine, ETHZilla, and Upexi are rushing to copy it. The strategy has sent stocks soaring but it comes with serious risks around debt, dilution, and valuation. Is this the future of corporate crypto or just another bubble ready to pop?Listen to Zaid’s interview with ETHZilla’s executive chairman hereThis video is for informational purposes only and reflects the views of the host and guest, not Public Holdings or its subsidiaries. Mentions of assets are not recommendations. Investing involves risk, including loss. Past performance does not guarantee future results. For full disclosures, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Public.com/disclosures⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Welcome back to the rundown for another weekend deep dive. Today, we are talking about one of the hottest trends taking over Wall Street right now. Crypto Treasury companies. Michael Saylor and MicroStreachergy have sparked a new wave of companies copying the same playbook and investors can't get enough. So what exactly is going on here? Well, in today's episode, we'll break down what a crypto treasury company actually is, why these new treasury companies are focusing on Ethereum and Solana,

and why some on Wall Street are calling this a house. of cards. We got a great show for you today. Let's dive in. Let's start with the basics here and define what a crypto treasury company even is. See, typically when companies have extra cash, most of them keep that money in a savings account or buy some U.S. treasuries to earn some interest on that extra money. You know, just boring basic cash management. Crypto treasury companies, on the other hand, hold a significant portion of their cash in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and others. But what makes these companies unique is that they don't stop there.

Many of these companies raise even more money specifically to buy more crypto. These companies are issuing stock and taking on debt. And instead of building factories or hiring people to improve their business like normal companies do, they plow all that money into digital tokens. Essentially, their primary business becomes buying a ton of crypto. And the thinking here is that if the price of Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever crypto a company is holding goes up, the company's stock price should go up too. Sometimes the stock price goes up even more than the crypto price itself.

Now, if you think that taking on hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to buy and hold crypto is wild and pretty risky, well, you're not wrong, but we're going to talk more about the risk in a bit. And even with the risk involved, that hasn't stopped the stock price of these newly formed crypto treasury companies to go to the moon after their announcement. In fact, these days, you have many companies ditching their old business model and reinventing themselves as crypto treasuries to capitalize on the hype. We're going to cover three of the crypto treasury companies that are getting the most buzz right now on Wall Street. But before we do,

we first need to talk about the origin of the crypto treasury strategy because it's not new. It actually started back in 2020 with Michael Saylor. You might have heard of him. So let's talk more about Mike. You can't talk about crypto treasuries without talking about the OG Michael Saylor. Back in 2020, Michael Saylor was a CEO of a software company called MicroStrategy. Now, the company was doing okay, but the stock had flatlined after the dot-com crash. So in August of 2020, Michael Saylor made a bold move. He announced that Micro Strategy was going to start using its cash to buy Bitcoin. At first, they bought $250 million worth of Bitcoin, but Michael Saylor didn't stop there. He kept buying Bitcoin consistently for the last five years. Fast forward to today,

the company has now changed their name to being just strategy, and they own over 600,000 Bitcoin worth more than $70 billion. Obviously, those numbers might be different depending on when you're watching this video. If you're watching this in 2030, they might have over a trillion dollars worth of Bitcoin. Or I guess it could also be worth zero. If you're watching this from the future, let me know in the comments how much Bitcoin Micro Strategy still owns. Now, getting back to Michael Stalers bet on Bitcoin, he wasn't just using Micro Strategy

Spare Cash to Buy Bitcoin. Micro Strategy started issuing convertible bonds and selling new shares to raise cash. And here's where things get interesting. As the price of Bitcoin would go up, their stock price would go up even faster because investors were willing to pay a premium. Micro Strategy then sells even more stock, this time at a higher price, to buy even more Bitcoin. As they bought Bitcoin, the price of Bitcoin would go up, and their stock price would go up. It's kind of like a perpetual money-making machine as long as the price of Bitcoin keeps going up,

which it has over the last few years. And this aggressive strategy by Michael Saylor has been great for the stock price. Micro Strategy stock has gone up about 3,000% since the company first started buying Bitcoin back in August of 2020. This has created a blueprint that a lot of other companies are now doing with other digital assets. So let's talk about some of these up-and-coming companies betting it all on crypto. After seeing Michael Saylor's success over the past few years, there are dozens of crypto treasury companies pop it up these days. But these new wave of companies aren't choosing to buy Bitcoin. Instead, they're buying crypto assets like Ethereum and Solana,

For one key reason, staking and yield maxing. See, unlike Bitcoin, which just sits there like digital gold, certain cryptocurrencies can be staked to help secure the network. In return for staking, the staker earns a yield, almost like an interest payment, which can be between 3 to 9% a year. So that means that these new treasury companies holding Ethereum or Solana aren't just holding a speculative asset.

They're holding a productive asset that can generate a steady stream of revenue. And this fundamentally changes the business model compared to what Microsoft, So let's talk about some of the companies making waves with this new strategy. Let's start with Bitmine immersion. This company trades under ticker symbol BMNR. Now, this company used to be a Bitcoin miner, but earlier this summer, they announced an Ethereum treasury strategy. Essentially, this company is going to be following the same Michael Saylor playbook, but for

Ethereum. They raised $250 million in July, and over the past month or so, they've been on an absolute buying spree. They've now accumulated over 1.15 million Ethereum tokens worth nearly $5 billion. That makes them the largest corporate holder of Ethereum in the world. And while BitMine is using the Micro Strategy Playbook, their plan is to acquire Ether at a much faster rate than Michael Saylor did with Bitcoin. And they believe that gives them an edge.

I mean, if you look at this chart, you can see that it took BitMine less than three weeks to reach the holding value that it took Micro Strategy six months to reach. And the leadership of this company is pretty legit. They're led by Tom Lee from Frontstrat. You might have seen them on CNBC or on Twitter. He's a 25-year Wall Street vet. So his involvement has earned a lot of attention, not just from the crypto crowd, but from

the traditional finance community as well. And Tom Lee says that his goal for BitMine is to eventually own 5% of all the Ethereum in circulation, which would be worth over $25 billion at the current price. The company's tagline is the alchemy of 5%. And look, the strategy has worked out pretty well so far. Bitmine's stock is up more than a thousand. thousand percent since announcing the ETH Treasury pivot back in July. And here's another crazy stat. The trading volume for this stock at one point crossed $2.2 billion in a day, which is more

volume than J.P. Morgan's stock. That's pretty wild for a company that no one had heard of two months ago. Now, Tom Lee is very bullish on Ethereum, and he points to the rise of stable coins as the chat GPT moment for Eith. And he sees that as the top macro trend for finance in the years ahead. Bitmind points to the Genius Act, which was signed into Lerium. law back in July, which establishes a clear federal framework for stable coin issuance, and this law could set the stage for a stable coin boom that will open up a new frontier for crypto innovation. And BitMind expect most of this innovation to happen on the Ethereum blockchain, especially as major corporations like Walmart, J.P. Morgan and others look at

issuing their own stable coins. And BitMine isn't the only treasury company that's very bullish on Ethereum right now. There's a company called Eithzilla, which honestly sounds like a name of a kaiju movie, but it's actually a bio-evales. tech slash eye gaming company that completely pivoted to crypto. The company used to be called 180 Life Sciences, but I think they realized that name was not very memorable. So they rebranded to ETHZilla and raised $425 million to buy Ethereum. The company now holds over 82,000 ETH with an average buy price of $3,800 a token. And just this past week, they announced an investment from billionaire Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, which caught the attention of the markets and sent their

stock up over 200% in a single day. And their business model is even more aggressive than Bitmines. They're not just going to be staking their Ethereum. They're also going to be using complex defy strategies to maximize their yield with help from electric capital and a defy council of crypto experts. And all the money they make from this yield, they're going to buy more Ethereum. I actually had a chance to talk to the chairman of ETHZilla on the leading indicator podcast this past week. Listen to what he said about why he's so bullish on Eith and how they plan to build a business around it. Ask why ETH over Bitcoin over Solana, some of these other assets out there?

Why we're accumulating ETH. Number one is we think that Ethereum is going to be used for a plethora of different opportunities, both in the Ethereum network to generate yield and then in the real world to codify these assets that create yield. And ETHZILA sits at the center of all these things. So at ETHZILA, we're building a business that generates cash flow from investing in the Ethereum network. not just staking, but yield farming, tokenization, everything that you can do on chain, we can generate a high single-digit yield on the capital. So the more capital we deploy in Ethereum in particular, and we have to own that Ethereum to deploy it,

we'll just generate more and more cash flow. And that's why we built this business. That entire conversation was pretty interesting. We talked more about the business model of ETHZILA, how they came up with the name, and how they're different from other ETH Treasury companies. We'll link to the interview in the description if you want to check that out. And finally, let's talk about UPECC. This company trades under ticker symbol UPXI.

This company also made a hard pivot going from selling consumer products on Amazon to being a Salana treasury company. They raised $100 million back in April of 2025 to buy Salana tokens, and as of today, they own about 2 million Salana tokens worth nearly $350 million at today's prices. Similar to Eidzilla and Bitmine, the company plans to stake Solana to earn revenue. Now, when OPEXE announced the pivot to being a Salana holding company in April, their stock jumped 600% in the single day going from $2 to over $15. But the stock has lost more than half its value since the peak back in April, with a big drop coming in June after a regulatory filing showed that insiders were planning to sell over $48 million shares. Still, the company today trades at over $7 a share, which is 3x higher than it was back in April before they announced this pivot to being a Salana treasury company.

So those are just three notable companies pivoting to being a crypto treasury company. There are dozens more and new ones being announced almost every single week at this point. And all these companies are following the same basic playbook. They raise money, they buy crypto, and their stock price goes to the moon. It all sounds great, especially if you get an early on the stock. But now we got to talk about the risk and why some on Wall Street are calling all of this a house of cards. So all of this sounds pretty exciting so far. But is it sustainable?

Or are we just in another classic bubble situation like we have with the dot-com bubble and the SPAC bubble back in 2021? Well, there are some real red flags to keep in mind. First, you have the valuation. They are getting absolutely bonkers. Some of these crypto treasury companies are trading at an insane premium to net asset value. That's a fancy way of saying that the stock is worth more than the crypto the company actually owns. There are some crypto treasury stocks that are trading at near two times their net asset value. That means that investors are willing to pay $2.

for every $1 of crypto the company actually owns. As a specific example, let's talk about Bitmind. At the time of this recording, they hold about 1.15 million Eth worth about $5 billion. But if you look at the company's market cap, it's at near $10 billion. Another example is Michael Saylor's strategy. It holds about $70 billion worth of Bitcoin,

but the company's market cap is worth over $110 billion. And there are more and more examples just like this. And that's one reason why famous short-seller Jim Chanos has a short position on Michael Saylor's strategy. Jim Chano says that Michael Saylor is a wonderful salesman, but that his valuation model is financial gibberish. Check out this clip from an interview that he did with Bloomberg back in June. Michael Saylor is a wonderful salesman, but that's what he is.

He's a salesman. And what he's selling investors is the concept that you give me your money, and I'm just going to go by Bitcoin. And hopefully the value of my stock trades at a premium to the value of that Bitcoin. And so as long as I can keep doing that, I generate value. And this is, of course, I called it financial gibberish. So yeah, clearly Jim Chanos is not a fan of strategy. And that's why he's shorting the stock and instead just buying Bitcoin instead.

That way you can get the exposure to Bitcoin without having to pay the insane premium that comes with strategy stock. But you know, the valuation of these companies isn't the only issue. The other problem here is share dilution. A lot of these companies consistently issue new stock to raise money and buy more crypto. That means that existing shareholders on a smaller and smaller piece of the pie. So if the price of the underlying crypto doesn't go up fast enough to offset the dilution, when investors can end up losing. And to me, the biggest problem with these crypto treasury companies is the insane amount of debt

and leverage that they're taking on. If the crypto market has a big pullback in prices, these companies could be forced to sell their holdings to pay back loans, which could create a cascading sell-off. Prices start going down, the companies start selling their crypto to raise the money to pay back the loans. prices of crypto go down even more, more companies start selling, and it creates a death loop. And that's why critics say this whole thing is built on a house of cards,

relying on crypto prices to keep going up. As soon as that stops happening and we see a major pullback, the whole crypto treasury strategy could end up collapsing. So what's the takeaway here? Well, the rise of crypto treasury companies is pretty fascinating, but a little frightening too. On one hand, it's a sign that corporations are adopting crypto. These companies are providing a regulatory.

accessible way for normal investors to get exposure to digital assets through the stock market. But on the other hand, it all feels so incredibly frothy right now. I mean, just announcing a crypto treasury strategy makes a stock price of a once struggling company to go to the moon. But when the music stops and crypto prices see a major pullback, these companies could be incredibly vulnerable. So as an investor, you have to ask yourself, why are you buying a stock of a company? If in this case, it's to get exposure to crypto like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, where you've got

a lot of options these days. You could go on public.com and buy the actual crypto token, or you can buy a spot ETF without having to pay the crazy 2x or 3x premium. But if you're an investor that just enjoys the thrill of finding the next micro strategy and potentially having a 3,000% upside, just be careful out there. Well, all right, guys, that's it for today's weekend. Deep dive. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. If you did and you have like nine extra seconds, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen to your podcast. Also consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. We're posting a lot of clips and content there.

And let us know in the comments on Spotify or YouTube if you think that crypto treasury companies are the next big thing or if it's just another classic bubble. It's going to be very interesting listening back to this video in a year. Thank you guys so much for listening and watching. Shout out to Mike and Connor. For all the work behind the scenes, I will see you guys back here on Monday.