One American company called Strategy owns more than 3% of all bitcoin in existence. Its executive chairman, Michael Saylor, is the pioneer of a new business model where publicly listed companies buy cryptocurrency assets to hold on their balance sheet.

Strategy, formerly called MicroStrategy, first bought US$250 million (£187 million) worth of bitcoin in mid-2020 during the depths of the COVID economic slump. As it continued to buy bitcoin, its share price soared, and it kept buying. As of October 2025, Strategy held 640,418 bitcoin, worth around $70 billion.

In the years since, more than 100 other public companies have followed Saylor’s lead and become bitcoin treasury companies, together holding more than $114 billion of bitcoin. There’s been a new rush into crypto treasury assets in 2025 following the general crypto enthusiasm of the new Trump administration.

But holding bitcoin assets also comes with some big risks, particularly given the volatility of cryptocurrency prices, and the share prices of some of these companies are now coming under pressure.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Larisa Yarovaya, director of the centre for digital finance at the University of Southampton, about whether bitcoin treasury companies are the future of corporate finance, or another speculative bubble waiting to burst.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood, Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware. Mixing and sound design by Michelle Macklem and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

Newsclips in this episode from CBC News, Bloomberg Television, Yahoo Finance, Altcoin Daily, Strategy and CNBC Television.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.