Korea to Treat Crypto Exchanges Like Banks After Upbit Hack

Digital asset treasury companies that rushed to copy Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin strategy are now hemorrhaging shareholder value, with median stock prices down 43% year to date, even as the broader market climbs higher, as per .Source: Bloomberg

More than 100 publicly traded companies transformed themselves into cryptocurrency-holding vehicles in the first half of 2025, borrowing billions to buy digital tokens while their stock prices initially soared past the value of the underlying assets they purchased.

The strategy seemed unstoppable until market reality delivered a harsh correction.Strategy’s Model Spawns Industry-Wide Collapse

Strategy Inc.’s Michael Saylor pioneered the approach of converting corporate cash into Bitcoin holdings, transforming his software company into a publicly traded cryptocurrency treasury.

The model worked spectacularly through the mid-2025, attracting high-profile investors, including the Trump family.

SharpLink Gaming epitomized the frenzy. The company pivoted from traditional gaming operations, appointed an Ethereum co-founder as chairman, and announced massive token purchases.

💰Sharplink Gaming added $80M in Ether to its reserves, lifting total holdings to $3.6B and cementing its spot as the second-largest corporate holder of ETH. — Cryptonews.com (@cryptonews)

Its stock exploded 2,600% within days before crashing 86% from peak levels, leaving total market capitalization below the value of its Ethereum holdings at just 0.9 times crypto reserves.

Bloomberg data tracking 138 U.S. and Canadian digital asset treasuries shows the median share price has fallen 43% year-to-date, dramatically underperforming Bitcoin’s modest 7% decline.

In comparison, the S&P 500 gained 6% and the Nasdaq 100 rose 10%.

Strategy shares have dropped 60% from their July highs, even as they have risen by more than 1,200% since the company began buying Bitcoin in August 2020.Source: Bloomberg

“Investors took a look and understood that there’s not much yield from these holdings rather than just sitting on this pile of money,” B. Riley Securities analyst Fedor Shabalin told Bloomberg.Debt Obligations Expose Structural Flaws

The fundamental problem plaguing these companies stems from how they fund cryptocurrency purchases.

Strategy and its imitators issued massive amounts of convertible bonds and preferred shares, raising over $45 billion across the industry to acquire digital tokens that generate no cash flow.

These debt instruments carry substantial interest and dividend obligations that cryptocurrency holdings cannot service, creating a structural mismatch between liabilities that require regular payments and assets that produce zero income.

Strategy faces annual fixed obligations of approximately $750 million to $800 million tied to preferred shares.

Companies that avoided Bitcoin for smaller, more volatile cryptocurrencies suffered the steepest losses.

Alt5 Sigma, backed by two Trump sons and planning to purchase over $1 billion in World Liberty Financial’s WLFI token, has crashed more than 85% from its June peak.Source:

Strategy attempted to address funding concerns by raising $1.44 billion in dollar reserves through stock sales, covering 21 months of dividend payments.Saylor Admits Potential Bitcoin Sales

The industry now faces its defining moment. Strategy CEO Phong Le the company would sell Bitcoin if needed to fund dividend payments, specifically if the firm’s market value falls below its cryptocurrency holdings.

Those comments sent shockwaves through the digital asset treasury sector, given Saylor’s repeated insistence that Strategy would never sell, famously joking in February to “sell a kidney if you must, but keep the Bitcoin.“

At December’s Binance Blockchain Week, Saylor the revised approach, stating that “when our equity is trading above the net asset value of the Bitcoin, we just sell the equity,” but “when the equity’s trading below the value of the Bitcoin, we would either sell Bitcoin derivatives, or we would just sell the Bitcoin.“

The reversal raises fears of a downward spiral where forced crypto sales push token prices lower, further pressuring treasury company valuations and potentially triggering additional selling.

Strategy’s monthly Bitcoin accumulation has collapsed from 134,000 BTC at the 2024 peak to just 9,100 BTC in November, with only 135 BTC added so far in December.

The company now holds approximately 650,000 BTC, valued at over $56 billion, representing more than 3% of Bitcoin’s maximum supply.

Market participants worry that leveraged traders using borrowed money to invest in these companies could face margin calls, forcing broader market selloffs.

Strategy has created a $1.4 billion reserve fund to cover near-term dividend payments, but shares remain on track for a 38% decline this year despite the company’s massive Bitcoin holdings.

Peter Brandt's new Bitcoin chart gives a straight message that bulls will not like. His weekly setup shows a clear five-leg climb, a broken curve and two landing zones that are far below today's price. The first one sits near $81,852, and the deeper one is around $59,403 per BTC.

The trader with 50-year experience in markets does not see them as panic markers, but as the natural clean-up after a run that stretched too far while traders priced in an endless policy pivot.

The bigger picture helps explain why Brandt's targets do not look extreme. It is like late 2025 is the same as late 2021, just the opposite. Prices are dropping, but the major indexes like S&P 500 are still doing okay. Four years ago, the market was getting ready for quantitative tightening, now it is the easing narrative.

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The main issue is that a lot of assets already trade as if rates are going to drop quickly. Crypto followed the same logic, ignoring that future cuts may already be in the chart.

Fed risk for Bitcoin ahead?

If the Fed's next meeting turns out to be colder than expected, Brandt's lower zones will just be a simple correction for over-optimism. Nothing too crazy, it is just the market taking out the extra air.

We have already seen this pattern when it comes to risk names. The S&P 500 dropped over 20% earlier this year, but it recovered quickly. Bitcoin did something similar on the upside, grinding into a curve that no longer holds. A dip toward Brandt's numbers fits that pattern.

There is one more thing to watch out for outside the Bitcoin price chart like large corporate holders like Strategy getting ready to change game plan if liquidity thins. Any move like that would just speed up a slide that has already been mapped out. 

Until things calm down, Bitcoin's easier path is going back to levels that bulls hoped they would never see again.

American computer scientist and legal scholar Nick Szabo has opined that Bitcoin should be treated as a "trust-minimized insurance."

"The wisest of all will self-custody Bitcoin, the actual trust-minimized asset, as insurance against the most extreme outcomes, which any serious student of economic history knows have a far from zero probability," he said.

Unlike banks, custodians, or governments, Bitcoin doesn’t require you to trust a third party. If you self-custody your Bitcoin, no one can seize or inflate it. Fiat money (like USD, EUR) can be diluted through inflation or government debt issuance.

Bitcoin acts as a form of protection against extreme economic scenarios.

The two schools 

Szabo has responded to Fred Krueger’s framing of Bitcoin futures as two schools. 

The "dark side" school sees Bitcoin being co-opted, stolen, or heavily controlled. Users cannot trust institutions or wrapped solutions.

Within the "Joe" school, Bitcoin becomes high-powered money integrated into the banking system. Custody solutions, wrapped tokens, and credit instruments will exist. Trust-minimization is maintained through careful design.

Szabo identifies with the "Joe" school, but he’s still advocating for self-custody as the ultimate trust-minimized insurance.

Even if banks and credit instruments adopt Bitcoin, the most prudent approach is to hold some personally. 

Under this hybrid model, institutions add low-dilution Bitcoin to portfolios as a hedge against inevitable fiat debt dilution driven by demographics, while individuals self-custody it for insurance against hyperinflation or systemic collapse.

Dog-themed cryptocurrency Dogecoin is marking its 12th anniversary, having launched Dec. 6, 2013, by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer. It is considered both the first "meme coin" and, more specifically, the first "dog coin."

The Shiba Inu is a Japanese breed of dog that was popularized as an online meme and represents Dogecoin.

In a tweet, Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus, who goes by the alias of Shibetoshi Nakamoto on X, celebrates Dogecoin's 12th anniversary and in his usual witty manner, playfully saying how it all started.

"12 years ago i made something stupid and then a bunch of even stupider stuff happened and now i am posting about it on the internet to 2.15 million followers, happy 12th genesis day, Dogecoin," Markus wrote in a playful tweet, referring to his followers on X.

Seemingly, Markus was oblivious of the number of his X followers, which has surpassed 2.2 million, while correcting himself in another tweet: "oh, 2.26 million followers apologies to the 110k i initially missed you are all special to."

Originally created as a joke, Dogecoin has gained traction in the crypto space and ranks as the ninth largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of $22.56 billion, trading at $0.1396 at press time.

How it all started

Dogecoin co-founder Jackson Palmer, who at the time was a member of the Adobe marketing department in Sydney, Australia, bought the domain Dogecoin.com and added a splash screen, which featured the coin's logo and scattered Comic Sans text.

Billy Markus reached out to Palmer after seeing the site and started efforts to develop the currency. Markus designed Dogecoin's protocol based on existing cryptocurrencies Luckycoin and Litecoin, which use scrypt technology in their proof-of-work algorithm.

The Japanese Shiba Inu Kabosu is behind the "doge" meme and the face of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. In 2010, two years after adopting Kabosu from a puppy mill where she would otherwise have been put down, Sato, a teacher from Sakura, east of Tokyo, took a picture of her pet crossing her paws on the sofa. Afterward, variations of the pictures using overlaid Comic Sans text were posted from a Tumblr blog Shiba Confessions.

The Japanese Shiba Inu, which inspired a generation of online jokes, passed away in May 2024 after 14 years of internet fame.

French banking heavyweight BPCE is preparing to introduce crypto trading to millions of its retail customers, making it one of the first major traditional European banks to offer digital assets.

According to a report from The Big Whale, the group will allow users to buy and sell Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Solana (SOL) and USDC (USDC) directly inside its Banque Populaire and Caisse d’Épargne mobile apps starting Monday.

The initial rollout will cover clients of four regional banks, including Banque Populaire Île-de-France and Caisse d’Épargne Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, reaching roughly 2 million customers. BPCE plans to extend the service gradually across its remaining 25 regional entities through 2026, ultimately making crypto trading available to its full 12-million-strong retail base.

A bank insider reportedly told The Big Whale that the phased approach is intended to “monitor how the service performs at launch” before scaling.

During a recent interview, Mark Yusko stated that Bitcoin had already won. 

"I'm a long-term wildly bullish believer in Bitcoin. To me, Bitcoin has won as the money for the next 5,000 years. So, gold was money for the last 5,000[years]. Bitcoin is money for the next 5,000. It's the transition from analog to digital."

Yukso sees Bitcoin as digital gold, a store of value that will endure over millennia. On the other hand, fiat money has no intrinsic value, and its purchasing power erodes over time due to inflation. 

"All fiat eventually goes to its intrinsic value, which is zero… The problem with currencies, there have been 775 paper currencies in the history of the world. Three-quarters of them no longer exist."

Smart contract platforms 

Yusko acknowledges that smart contracts and programmable blockchains (Ethereum, Solana) have value. Being a Bitcoin maximalist doesn’t preclude investing in other crypto projects.

"I want to like the whole smart contract universe because I do believe that there’s a role for a world computer… I’m torn because there are those that don’t want to believe in one or the other. They’re not mutually exclusive," he said. 

Yusko has stressed that he is a "technoloby maximalist." ""I am a technology maximalist. I love technology. I love working with innovators," he said. 

AI and crypto 

He sees a future where blockchain and AI integrate, enhancing security, verification, and intelligence. Blockchain provides trust-minimized infrastructure, AI provides decision-making and data analysis.

"I think those two technologies [AI and crypto] are absolutely intertwined. We call it blockchain intelligence. You need each other."