Bitcoin Tops $80,000 as Corporate Treasury Buyers Nurse $80 Billion in Losses

Bitcoin punched back above $80,000 on Tuesday, August 25, its highest level since May, according to The Epoch Times. The move capped the cryptocurrency's strongest three-day rally since 2023, with bitcoin up roughly 20 percent over that span.

Bitcoin sank as low as $58,000 in June. It's also still well off the all-time high of $124,000 hit in September 2025. Bitcoin has now round-tripped from record highs to a near-bear-market low and back to a three-month high in less than a year.

The rally spilled into altcoins. Ether cleared $2,500 after climbing more than 30 percent in a week, according to The Epoch Times. Solana jumped 35 percent past $100. Cardano, Dogecoin, and XRP each rose more than 30 percent over the same stretch.

Why Traders Say It's Happening

Tom Essaye, president and co-founder of the Sevens Research Report, told The Epoch Times the rally reflects a "debasement trade," meaning capital rotating out of market leadership and into assets seen as hedges against inflation and government spending. Gold moved in tandem, edging up about 5 percent to roughly $4,700 an ounce as the dollar's year-to-date gains got cut in half.

Regulatory moves added fuel. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins announced a new digital asset framework on August 18, saying it would give "crypto asset entrepreneurs and market participants clear pathways to raise capital under federal securities laws." President Trump has also pushed Congress to pass the Clarity Act, legislation meant to codify crypto market rules.

Money followed the headlines. Wall Street funneled almost $2 billion into bitcoin ETFs last week, the biggest weekly inflow since October, per The Epoch Times. More than $4 billion in leveraged short bets got liquidated in the process, which tends to accelerate a rally by forcing traders betting against bitcoin to buy back in at a loss.

Options traders are positioning for more upside but with guardrails. Jean-David Pequignot, chief commercial officer at Deribit, the largest crypto options exchange by volume, told CoinDesk that call spreads, buying the right to purchase bitcoin at one price while selling the right at a higher price, remain popular heading into September because they cap both gains and losses ahead of Federal Reserve decisions and inflation data. Markus Thielken, founder of 10x Research, recommended a similar structure: buying bitcoin and selling $90,000 September calls against it. Coinglass data cited by CoinDesk shows September has averaged a negative 3 percent return for bitcoin since 2013, a seasonal headwind analysts aren't ignoring even in a bullish stretch.

The Companies That Bet the Balance Sheet Are Still Underwater

The corporate strategy of raising capital specifically to stockpile bitcoin has been quietly falling apart.

An analysis by the Financial Times, cited by both the FT News Briefing podcast and Crypto Times, found that the 50 largest publicly listed bitcoin treasury companies have lost more than $80 billion in combined market value over the past 13 months. Their combined market cap fell from about $150 billion in July 2025 to roughly $67 billion now. On a rolling 12-month basis the same group lost close to $57 billion.

Strategy, the Nasdaq-listed company formerly known as MicroStrategy and the firm that pioneered this playbook under Michael Saylor starting in August 2020, accounts for the biggest chunk of that decline, with its market cap down roughly $79 billion from its peak.

The Financial Times analysis, which excluded exchanges, miners, and companies that hold bitcoin as part of normal operations, found 43 of the 50 firms now trade below the share price they had before announcing a bitcoin treasury strategy. Thirty-five have fallen by at least half.

The mechanism, per Crypto Times, was a persistent premium these companies traded at relative to the value of the bitcoin they held, known as mNAV. When that premium evaporated, firms that had been net buyers turned into net sellers, undercutting the entire rationale for the model. Hundreds of companies, from coffee chains to battery manufacturers, had copied the Strategy template using equity issuance, convertible debt, and preferred stock to fund bitcoin purchases through 2024 and into 2025.

Bitcoin itself is rallying hard on ETF inflows and regulatory optimism. But shareholders who bought into public companies specifically because those companies promised bitcoin exposure through corporate treasuries are, for the most part, still sitting on losses relative to when those bets were announced.

Neither the Epoch Times rally coverage nor the CoinDesk options analysis mentions the treasury-company collapse at all. Only the Financial Times reporting, carried through its podcast and picked up by Crypto Times, connects the two stories. A reader following only the bullish rally coverage would have no idea that the corporate vehicle built to ride bitcoin's gains has, for most of its 50 biggest players, failed to do so even as the underlying asset climbs back toward $80,000.

Whether the bitcoin rally eventually lifts those treasury company valuations back toward their purchase prices, or whether the mNAV premium that funded the whole model is gone for good, remains unresolved. September's historically weak seasonality for bitcoin, and the Fed's next moves on rates, will be the next test.