A bitcoin and ether selloff is tanking shares of crypto treasury companies like Strategy and BitMine; Strategy's valuation is down from ~$128B in July to ~$70B
What It Means for the Broader Crypto Market Jamie Wilde / The Daily Upside : Rough Week Erases Most of Crypto's 2025 Gains Vivian Nguyen / Crypto Briefing : BitMine acquires $70M worth of Ether for treasury: on-chain data Wahid Pessarlay / Coinspeaker : Strategy Gearing Up to Buy Bitcoin While OG Whale Keeps Selling Rony Roy / crypto.news : Robinhood says no immediate plans to launch a cryptocurrency treasury Aliyu Pokima / ZyCrypto : Willy Woo Dismisses Bitcoin Liquidation Risk for Strategy in Future Bear Market X: @maverick_equity : Bitcoin -16% drawdown $BTC MicroStrategy -46% drawdown $MSTR All that ‘intelligent leverage’, high yield, perpetuals and ‘variable monthly dividend designed to maintain a stable price’ ... are not working anymore? 😇🙃😃 From -16% underlying to -46% in the portfolio = the new [image] LinkedIn: Gregory Zuckerman : NEW from me and Vicky Ge Huang : — The year's hottest crypto trade is crumbling. It's a key reason crypto prices have been under pressure … Forums: r/MSTR : WSJ: The Year's Hottest Crypto Trade Is Crumbling
Context & Ripple Effects
Strategy had already become the reference point for a broader group of companies buying crypto for their balance sheets; by September, shares of treasury-model copycats were already weakening amid questions about differentiation and volatility.
This selloff deepens a pattern seen when crypto prices fall: Strategy’s shares dropped sharply during the 2022 crypto-market slump, while later coverage described the treasury-company boom as unraveling alongside crypto losses.
First-order effects
- The bitcoin and ether decline immediately reduces the market value investors assign to crypto-heavy treasury vehicles, with Strategy’s valuation falling from roughly $128B in July to about $70B and BitMine shares also under pressure.
- Strategy and BitMine face a more difficult backdrop for defending treasury accumulation as a source of equity-market value; Robinhood’s stated lack of immediate treasury plans underscores that the model is not a default corporate strategy.
Second-order effects
- Falling valuations raise the bar for other crypto-treasury companies: investors are likely to distinguish more sharply between firms with an operating business and those whose equity mainly provides leveraged exposure to crypto prices.
- The downturn reinforces the pressure already visible among crypto-buying corporate copycats, potentially constraining their ability to use a richly valued stock as support for additional treasury purchases.
Third-order effects
- If crypto-treasury equities repeatedly decline more sharply than the assets they hold, the sector may trade less as a corporate-adoption story and more as a high-beta wrapper around bitcoin or ether exposure.
- That would leave the model vulnerable to a self-reinforcing cycle in which lower crypto prices reduce equity valuations, weakening the strategic case for further balance-sheet accumulation; the pace and severity depend on future asset prices and financing conditions.
The trend: Corporate crypto-treasury strategies are being tested as market volatility exposes the gap between holding digital assets and sustaining a durable public-company valuation premium.