With the Bitcoin (BTC) Treasury bubble in the spring of 2025, the historians of public trusts are beginning to contextualize what has already happened.
At its peak in May, David Bailey’s BTC Treasury shares traded at 23 times the value of the Treasury. Even Altcoin Treasury stocks were reflected in a double-digit multiple of net asset value (“MNAV”). Fast forward to today, and the majority of BTC finance companies released in 2025 have fallen by more than half.
The collapse is similar to the mutual fund crash of the late 1920s. During this enthusiastic environment for speculation, US investors re-signed London-style mutual funds and added leverage.
The pitch at the time was to sell shares in trusts that held superficially rare assets through public stock exchanges. When the 20s peaked in 1929, Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation became the micro-tactics of its time.
Yale Economist Irving Fisher once comically declared the unsustainable stock price of 1929 in some way a “permanently high plateau.” However, the quote “actually, Bitcoiner cited built-in demand from the Bitcoin Treasury today, and in fact, defended mutual funds as important support for stock valuation,” one author explained in a comparison between these trusts and the latest Bitcoin Finance companies.
Advocate for mutual funds to justify stock valuations
In fact, many fans of BTC finance companies have argued that the tight supply of BTC can somehow justify the valuation of the finance companies.
These companies trade for BTC with generous multiples and have done little else to justify their otherwise lofty valuations, but the role of their gobbling coins is said to be very valuable.
read more: Did Bitcoin Bank Halfiny dream of micro-strategy?
In 1929, Fisher, like Michael Saylor, founder of MicroStrategy in 2025, defended an invention like trust that “will awaken people to the advantage of equity over bonds and provide investors with a superior structure to gain stock exposure.”
Certainly, Saylor speaks endlessly about his tenuous securities role in defending BTC, where they derive value.
In short, the comparison between BTC Treasury stocks and public mutual fund bubbles in the 20’s is an attractive lens for looking at some of the marketing rhetoric by digital asset promoters.