Ilya Rekhter: Firms put bitcoins on balance sheet to boost value

There are a few ways for a publicly traded company to move its stock price: Innovate to capture new markets, cut costs to protect profits, or grow the balance sheet to boost shareholder value. Innovation, while the ideal solution, comes with one nagging problem: It’s hard.

Breakthroughs are unpredictable; require talent, time and capital; and often end up as expensive learning experiences rather than profitable ventures. As a result, most companies choose Door No. 2: cutting costs. “Streamlining,” “strategic realignment,” “rightsizing”—call it what you want. It usually ends the same way: layoffs, hiring freezes, and a morale problem that no amount of free snacks can fix.

Lately, though, a few public companies have quietly turned their attention to an intriguing third strategy: using cash on hand to buy bitcoin. It’s not just a PR play or a passing trend. These companies are signaling a deeper philosophical shift in how they think about long-term value preservation. Rather than sit on large cash reserves that lose value year after year due to inflation, some are turning to bitcoin as a store of value—one that, historically, has moved in the opposite direction of fiat currency.

At its core, the logic is simple. Bitcoin has delivered a compound annual growth rate of 29% over the past five years. Not month-over-month, not hype-driven speculation, but multiyear compounding growth. Meanwhile, inflation has quietly chipped away at the purchasing power of dollars sitting idle on corporate balance sheets. For companies without a clear innovation pipeline and no appetite for the reputational blowback that comes with layoffs, bitcoin has started to look like a surprisingly practical option.

The Virginia-based public company MicroStrategy is a prominent example. Once a sleepy provider of business intelligence software, the firm had a loyal customer base and stable revenue but no meaningful growth trajectory. CEO Michael Saylor didn’t sugarcoat it. He called his company a “zombie”—operational but directionless.

In 2020, MicroStrategy made its now-famous move. With a market value around $1.2 billion at the time, it began reallocating its excess cash into bitcoin. Fast forward to today, its market value is approximately $107 billion. The company holds around 582,000 bitcoins, or roughly 2.77% of the total supply. It has even launched bitcoin-backed financial products, giving traditional investors exposure to the asset without needing to custody it themselves. The company has gone from forgotten to first-in-class, at least when it comes to pioneering bitcoin treasury strategies.

MicroStrategy’s success has spawned a wave of imitators. Japan’s Metaplanet, previously a little-known company struggling to attract investors, added Bitcoin to its balance sheet in April 2024. At the time, its stock was languishing. Within months of the announcement, the price soared more than 500%. Metaplanet has even embraced the comparison, calling itself “Asia’s MicroStrategy.”

Then there’s GameStop. Once the poster child of meme stock mania, the company took full advantage of its internet-fueled resurgence by raising nearly $5 billion from 2021 to 2024. But raising capital is only half the story. What do you do with it when your core business (retail video games) is in secular decline?

This April, GameStop revealed it had allocated $513 million of its reserves into bitcoin. CEO Ryan Cohen called Bitcoin a hedge against currency devaluation and described its upside potential as far greater than gold. Whether that proves true or not, GameStop is no longer just a nostalgia play for retail investors; it’s a bitcoin treasury company now, too.

Other companies are joining the bitcoin treasury movement, including Semler Scientific, Twenty One, Nakamoto and Smarter Web Co. Each has carved out a unique reason for making bitcoin their treasury strategy. Some see it as protection against inflation. Others are repositioning their public image to attract a younger, more digitally native investor base. But all of them share one thing in common: They’re no longer content to let cash sit idle while purchasing power erodes.

Of course, skepticism remains. Detractors argue that these moves are little more than hype plays by smaller firms looking to make headlines. But that criticism is getting harder to defend. MicroStrategy’s rapid transformation from a niche software player to surpassing the market value of iconic brands like Starbucks and Nike suggests this isn’t just a passing curiosity. It’s a movement with momentum.

So here’s the real question: What happens first? Do tech giants like Apple ($48 billion cash reserves), Google ($95 billion), and Amazon ($94 billion) use their melting cash piles and buy bitcoin as a hedge against inflation? Or will bitcoin treasury companies like MicroStrategy keep riding bitcoin’s momentum until their market value overtakes the old guard?

In the 2010s, cash was king. In the 2020s, cash might just be kindling, waiting to be surpassed by something scarcer, harder and far more durable.

Something like bitcoin.•

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Rekhter is co-founder and CEO of Megawatt, a sustainable bitcoin mining company.