• GameStop has followed MicroStrategy’s business model of selling shares to raise capital for massive bitcoin purchases.
• Some investors believe these companies offer leveraged exposure to or occasional discounts on bitcoin.
• Bitcoin ETFs offer much more direct exposure with much less noise.

Just five years ago, GameStop (GME) was a struggling video game retailer, known for its aging storefronts in strip malls and its poor payouts on used game trade-ins. The company had been fading into irrelevance during the rise of digital downloads and cloud gaming long before the events of 2021. 

But that’s when the Reddit-fueled short squeeze on GameStop stock propelled the company back into relevance, and gave it quite the war chest through at-the-market equity offerings. Since then, the company has cycled through leadership, attempted a pivot to e-commerce and now — seemingly out of nowhere — has announced plans to start buying bitcoin. 

MicroStrategy (MSTR), on the other hand, was never relevant in the first place. It started as a business intelligence software company, offering data analytics tools. Wall Street largely ignored it for years — until 2020 when CEO Michael Saylor pivoted hard into buying bitcoin. 

Saylor called bitcoin “digital gold” and redefined the company’s primary objective, moving away from providing data analytics tools and instead buying all of the bitcoin it could, even issuing debt and equity to fund bitcoin purchases. In turn, MicroStrategy became known for its bitcoin holdings instead of for software, effectively turning into a publicly traded bitcoin trust with some side holdings in software. 

From strategy to stash: How two companies became bitcoin bulls

MicroStrategy beat GameStop to the bitcoin party by almost five years. Its buying journey began in August 2020, when it acquired $250 million in bitcoin, with the idea it would provide a hedge against inflation and a superior store of value to cash. 

Over the next few years, Saylor doubled and tripled down, issuing convertible notes, taking on debt and even selling shares to buy more bitcoin, explicitly stating that buying bitcoin is now its primary corporate strategy. Today, it holds over 200,000 bitcoin, and the company’s value fluctuates more with the price of bitcoin than with its software performance. 

GameStop’s pivot is more recent, more vague and raises more eyebrows. In May 2024, it filed a shelf offering and sold stock amid a meme-fueled rally. Then in May 2025, it announced it had purchased $500 million in bitcoin, citing “strategic flexibility.” 

Unlike MicroStrategy, GameStop gave no formal defense for the acquisition of bitcoin. It did not call it a hedge against inflation, justify it as a form of asset allocation or even give a nod to crypto gaming or Web3. The move comes off as reactionary, almost like the company is unsure what to do with its windfall of cash. 

While both companies used capital from meme-fueled rallies to buy their bitcoin, they have major differences in the reasoning for doing so. MicroStrategy’s pivot illustrates a philosophical and strategic shift, rooted in Saylor’s belief in bitcoin as a monetary revolution. For GameStop, it feels more like a meme-mirroring move, as though it is trying to align with its investor base at the expense of operational logic. 

Why investors buy stock in the companies for bitcoin exposure

Investors may prefer to own stock in GameStop or MicroStrategy instead of buying bitcoin directly for a number of reasons. For one, especially in the case of the latter, the company’s stock price moves like leveraged bitcoin instead of correlating perfectly with it, which can be attractive to short-term traders who just want to play the momentum. 

In other cases, investors may want exposure to bitcoin but can’t buy it directly because of regulatory, custodial or platform restraints. In this situation, MicroStrategy and GameStop provide BTC-adjacent exposure without the need for a wallet, essentially acting as a proxy asset for anyone uncomfortable holding the crypto natively. 

A more fringe reason that’s sometimes applicable is when the prices of these stocks lag behind moves in the price of bitcoin, which leads investors to view them as temporarily mispriced relative to the underlying value of bitcoin. 

All of these reasons seem to hold weight in various specific circumstances, but, in truth, they are all flawed in their own ways.

If you want bitcoin, just buy it

When you buy MicroStrategy or GameStop, you’re not just buying bitcoin — you’re buying unnecessary layers or risk on top of it. These stocks don’t just reflect the price of bitcoin but instead stack operating risk, dilution risk and managerial risk up alongside it. GameStop, for instance, has no operational crypto strategy, no stable revenue base, and has burned through leadership and ideas at a ridiculous pace the past few years. 

Investors also have much cleaner, cheaper and more transparent options now with the approval of spot bitcoin ETFs like IBIT, BITB, BITO, FBTC and ARKB. If you want to backdoor some bitcoin exposure through the traditional market, there’s no longer any need to use equity names when these ETFs exist. The ETFs also track bitcoin tightly, charge lower fees, avoid dilution and don’t carry any managerial risk. 

What’s more, these stocks overreact to bitcoin movement in both directions, adding volatility but not necessarily improving returns over time. They are essentially high-beta proxies for bitcoin, not one-to-one mirrors. You’re not gaining leverage — you’re adding noise. 

In the end, GameStop is a mall-based retailer with a fading core business, and MicroStrategy is still a mid-sized software firm. Their underlying business models have never changed, just their asset allocations, and that matters. When the bitcoin hype cycle eventually cools, these companies will be judged on what they actually do, not just what they hold, and what they actually do is not much.

Gus Downing is host of the tastylive Network show Risk and Reward. @GainsByGus
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