2,600% gains to 86% losses: How crypto bubble burst

What began the year as one of the best trades in the stock market has, in a matter of months, turned into one of the worst.

- By Monique MULIMA

‘An array of public companies thought they had found a sort of perpetual motion machine: Use your corporate cash to buy up bitcoin or other digital tokens and presto, your share price shot up even more than the value of the tokens you bought.

It was a playbook invented by Michael Saylor, who transformed his company, Strategy Inc., into a publicly traded bitcoin holding vehicle. And through the first half of 2025 it worked for more than a hundred other companies that followed Saylor’s lead.

Digital asset treasuries, as these firms became known, turned into one of the hottest trends in the public markets, as share prices skyrocketed and everyone from Peter Thiel to the Trump family piled in.

One prominent entrant, SharpLink Gaming Inc., soared more than 2,600% in a matter of days as the company said it would pivot from its old work in gaming, and sell shares to buy up lots and lots of Ethereum tokens, with one of Ethereum’s co-founders as the chairman.

But it was always hard to explain why tokens should be worth more just because they were held by a public company, and the wheels began to come off the car, at first slowly and then much more quickly.

In the case of SharpLink, the stock has fallen 86% from its peak, leaving the whole company worth less than the digital tokens it owns. ‘The company now trades at roughly 0.9 times its Ether holdings. It was, at least, spared the fate of Greenlane Holdings, which plunged more than 99% this year, despite its stash of around $48 million BERA crypto tokens.

“Investors took a look and understood that there's not much yield from these holdings rather than just sitting on this pile of money, and that’s why they contracted,” B. Riley Securities Analyst Fedor Shabalin said in an interview.