The Great Bitcoin Copy Machine
Bitcoin is being put into a box and sold back to the public by the very people it was meant to disrupt for an enormous, windfall profit. Retail will suffer, again.
Bitcoin is trustless, permissionless, censorship-resistant, and inflation-proof.
It was supposed to be about freedom. Freedom from the state. Freedom from central banks. Freedom from the self-dealing world of traditional finance. Not run by a monopolistic combine of financial oligarchs.
What we are getting instead is an asset class hijacked by insiders. Crypto is being monetized by the same cast of characters that brought you special purpose “acquisition” companies (SPACs), memestocks, the Golden Age of Grift, and maybe a flying taxi or two that still can’t fly.
This isn’t crypto’s revolution, it’s an invasion of sorts. By the new elites.
Two major trends have emerged. Stablecoins controlled by large companies (e.g. Circle, Tether, Paypal) are being integrated by the global payment giants (Mastercard, VISA, Stripe). More on this another time.
The second started with the largest financial companies, like Blackrock, Fidelity, and JPMorgan. Along with the payment platforms, these were the very institutions Bitcoin was supposed to disrupt.
Now a new White House-adjacent oligarchy is involved:
Two sons of the President
The son of the Secretary of Commerce under the President and an accused SPAC fraudster
The short-tenured ex-head of a new department under the President.
That is, it’s not Silicon Valley or Wall Street running things anymore. Or at least, not alone.
There is one obvious common element here. The 47th President endorsed a new crypto company, World Liberty Financial. He got the US state involved in speculating in Bitcoin with the Strategic Reserve. He even launched own meme coin.
But this recent twist is far bigger, and more dangerous.
From SPACs to Saylorism
It all started with Michael Saylor, who took a sleepy software firm and turned it into a Bitcoin vault with a Nasdaq listing. He didn’t just buy Bitcoin, he became the face of Bitcoin. MicroStrategy’s stock outperformed everything. Even Bitcoin.
Bitcoiners (mostly) cheered.
But the suits were watching. The well-connected ones. The ones who know where the elevators are in the White House. What Saylor had done was elegant: turn a volatile asset with limited institutional access into a public equity play on Bitcoin, creating market cap out of nothing.
So they did what any opportunists would do: they cloned it.
Begun, the Clone Wars Have
First into the arena is TwentyOne Capital, born via a reverse merger between crypto vehicle TwentyOne and SPAC Cantor Equity Partners (CEP). I wrote about it here. Call it MSTR 2.0. Or maybe just “MSTR minus the operating business.”
CEP traded at nearly 5x NAV post-announcement, before settling to more “reasonable” 3.2x (!) yesterday.
That's currently a 220% premium to the value of the Bitcoin it will hold. Why? Because somehow, wrapping Bitcoin in a press release and some of the largest SPAC and crypto opportunists (Tether is also involved) justifies that premium.
I recently predicted there would be copycats. Here they come.
Meet the New Acolytes
American Bitcoin (!) is a rebranded crypto mining venture backed by Don Jr. and Eric Trump. It is merging with Gryphon Digital Mining to create “the most investable Bitcoin accumulation platform in the market.”
Gryphon’s stock soared 173% the day of the announcement. If Saylor warrants a 2x on his Bitcoin, why not the Trumps?
And then there’s Strive Asset Management — founded by Vivek Ramaswamy, now officially out of management, but still featured prominently in the investor deck. The anti-woke asset manager announced a reverse merger with NASDAQ-listed Asset Entities to “build a Bitcoin war chest that outperforms Bitcoin.”
Wait, what?
Outperforming Bitcoin by… holding Bitcoin?
Here, at least, there may be value added in the financial engineering.
Strive offered a Section 351 tax-free exchange, letting big holders swap BTC for equity with no markup. They will then aim to buy public companies trading below net cash and convert it into Bitcoin. They're also going to borrow money to buy more Bitcoin. It’s like MicroStrategy, but with a private equity kicker.
Non-insiders seem to like this deal: Asset Entities is up 1,000% in a month. Meme stock-level returns. Someeone got rich.
Comparison of Bitcoin Treasury Copycats
The Empire Strikes Bitcoin
Bitcoin was supposed to be the rebellion. Instead, it's being re-engineered by the “Empire”, old school financial power brokers, into weapons of profit. This isn’t decentralization. It’s just repackaged control.
Take a volatile asset, wrap it in corporate paper, juice it with leverage, and sell it with a narrative. No product. No moat. No real innovation.
Pure financialization.
Bitcoin, once the outsider’s haven, is being converted into stock certificates, debt instruments, and wrapped equity deals with convertible bonds and private placements. And insiders are raking in the upside.
No wonder there are so many copycats. Likely with more to come.
The Phantom Premium
Efficient markets? Please. These stocks trade at double, even five times, the value of their Bitcoin. That premium is the business model.
The flywheel requires shares and convertibles to be issued at a premium to NAV. What happens when the music stops? Which it almost certainly will.
Just like in every mania, someone gets caught holding the bag. Between November 2024 and March 2025, MSTR's NAV premium halved. Bitcoin barely moved. Shareholders lost 40%. Even with MSTR still at a huge premium.
A New Grift
The pitch today isn’t subtle: No tech, no team, no roadmap. Just Bitcoin. Buy high. Sell higher.
In 2020–2021, SPACs became shorthand for “dumb money.” We got electric vehicles companies with no cars and flying taxis with no wings. Oh and huge losses for retail, even while insiders profited..
In 2025, they’re bringing us digital gold wrapped in family brands, some wonky financial engineering, and “Trust Me” slogans. And insiders will profit again.
Michael Saylor built a cult.
Wall Street meets the White House? Just more clones.