Corporate Bitcoin Tipping Point: Execs Bet Big on Inevitable Mass Adoption

Wall Street’s spreadsheet jockeys are finally waking up—the corporate Bitcoin floodgates are creaking open. Forget ’if.’ It’s now a question of when balance sheets start bleeding orange.

The institutional domino effect

From treasury hedge plays to tech-forward CFOs, the case for corporate Bitcoin holdings keeps gaining steam. MicroStrategy’s playbook doesn’t look so crazy anymore.

Liquidity meets legitimacy

With CME’s derivatives volume hitting records and BlackRock’s ETF sucking up supply, the ’volatility’ excuse is wearing thin. Even risk committees can’t ignore the math.

Will 2025 be the year corporate FOMO overrides legacy finance’s crypto allergy? Watch the quarterly filings—the smart money’s already moving while bankers debate ’store of value’ semantics.

Kraken CFO Stephanie Lemmerman made perhaps the most interesting prediction. She expects about 20% of the roughly 55,000 public companies to hold BTC a couple years from now.

That’s a lot of companies. Like 11,000.

A key piece of the nebulous “broader adoption” narrative you hear plenty about, companies jumping in can move prices while offering additional endorsements. 

Semler Scientific Chair Eric Semler noted how the medical tech provider — sitting on plenty of cash — was facing challenges within its CORE business. The company first bought BTC last year and now owns 3,303 BTC. 

While it took the old SEC months to approve Semler’s first at-the-market (ATM) offering to help it buy more bitcoin, Semler said, the new-look agency quickly greenlit its latest one.

There are possibly “thousands” of what the executive called “zombie” companies in a similar situation that would benefit from a BTC treasury strategy, he added.

Then there are those looking to go bigger. Twenty One Capital — a new entity backed by Tether and Softbank that is combining with Cantor Equity Partners — looks to launch with roughly 42,000 BTC. That would be behind only Strategy and bitcoin miner Marathon Digital. 

“There’re a lot of smaller-scale…bitcoin treasury companies, which have a role to play,” Cantor Fitzgerald’s Robert Harrington said. “But I think this market demands scale.” 

Once one of the Magnificent 7 companies starts buying BTC, many more will follow, panelists noted throughout the day. You might remember Microsoft shareholders rejected a related proposal in December. 

We know, of course, that bitcoin is volatile. An audience member asked what happens if BTC’s price falls below the price at which a company acquired it.

Establishing “board alignment” that this is a long-term play is crucial, said Fold General Counsel Hailey Lennon. She added: “Unless the fundamentals of bitcoin change, the goal is not to sell.”

Lemmerman noted too: “It’s not necessarily where you came in but where you expect [BTC] to be and what you’re forecasting.”

Fundstrat Capital CIO Tom Lee argued, too, that there’s “a lot more to the [bitcoin] treasury story” than buying a speculative asset that can appreciate. It’s a new accounting standard of sorts — “the idea that you don’t have to have cash holdings only in the US dollar.”     

Put another way, Kinetics Mutual Funds co-founder Peter Doyle said BTC is an off-ramp to “playing financial Whack-a-Mole” as governments continue to print money. That’s why he said all companies will ultimately adopt bitcoin.

Saylor “woke up” in 2020 when he realized what was happening to his cash and his business, Doyle noted. 

“They don’t feel that yet,” he added of others. “But they’re going to feel that.”

• Blockworks Daily: Unpacking crypto and the markets.
• Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.
• Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.
• 0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox.
• Lightspeed: All things Solana.
• The Drop: Apps, games, memes and more.
• Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.