Penny Stocks Attempt to Ride Crypto's Coattails
- May 12, 2025
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Education tech firm Classover Holdings (KIDZ) said in early May that it would sell $400 million worth of shares to buy solana. Its stock exploded higher. Shares of the thinly traded company, then with a market cap well shy of $50 million soared from $1.15 to more than $7 in just two sessions before settling back to the current $3.69. .
Classover wasn’t the first company to experience the crypto surge, and it won’t be the last.
A growing number of obscure, microcap and nanocap companies are embracing cryptocurrency — not as a business line or payment method, but as a headline-grabbing balance sheet item. They often follow the same script: an announcement of a shift in strategy to hold digital assets like bitcoin or solana, followed by a pop in the stock price.
Today, GD Culture Group (GDC), a company with a market cap of around $30 million, announced plans to sell up to $300 million in shares to buy bitcoin and TrumpCoin (TRUMP), a meme token themed around U.S. President Donald Trump. The company declared that this purchase was part of its new “crypto asset treasury strategy.” The stock rose 13% on the news.
Also today, Amber International Holdings (AMBR), valued at just under $900 million, said it would allocate $100 million to a basket of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, ethereum ETH, solana, XRP, Binance Coin BNB and sui SUI.
All are attempting to mimic the original corporate crypto evangelist: Strategy (MSTR). In August 2020, the enterprise-software company pivoted to using bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset. Since then, its stock has soared more than 3,000%, fueled not by software sales or product innovation, but the price of bitcoin. Many retail investors now treat the stock as a proxy for bitcoin exposure.
But while Strategy had a longstanding business and a consistent, transparent strategy — in addition to its chairman, Michael Saylor, emerging early as a bitcoin proponent — these newer companies appear to be leveraging the crypto hype machine with little track record or follow-through.
Take Worksport, a Nasdaq-listed manufacturer of truck bed covers. Last year, the company announced plans to invest its cash reserves into bitcoin and XRP . Its stock, which had been sliding for years, jumped after the announcement. But the rally didn’t last, and the stock has since returned to pre-announcement levels. The company said in April that it had made a six figure initial purchase.
“We are still bullish on our initial positions and have been holding. We will consider adding in the future as appropriate,” a spokesperson told CoinDesk at the time.