Are bitcoin treasuries mirroring the 1929 investment trust collapse?

As the bitcoin (BTC) treasury company bubble of spring 2025 deflates into summer doldrums, historians of public trusts are already starting to contextualize what happened.

At their peak in May, shares of David Bailey’s BTC treasury traded at 23 times the value of its treasury. Even altcoin treasury stocks rallied to double-digit multiples of their Net Asset Value (‘mNAV’). Fast forward to today, and the majority of BTC treasury companies that went public in 2025 have fallen by half or worse.

The collapse is similar to the investment trust crash of the late 1920s. During this exuberant environment for speculation, US financiers redesigned and added leverage to London-style investment trusts.

The pitch, at the time, was to sell shares of trusts holding ostensibly scarce assets via public stock exchanges. As the Roaring ‘20s peaked in 1929, Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation had become the MicroStrategy of its day.

Yale economist Irving Fisher once comically declared that unsustainable stock prices in 1929 were somehow a “permanently high plateau.” That quote, however, “was actually defending investment trusts as a key support for stock valuations, much as Bitcoiners cite built-in demand from Bitcoin treasuries today,” one writer explained in a comparison between these trusts and modern Bitcoin treasury firms.

Defending investment trusts to justify stock valuations

Indeed, many fans of BTC treasury companies claim that the hard-capped supply of BTC can somehow justify the valuations of treasury companies.

Even though these companies trade at generous multiples to their BTC and do little else to otherwise justify their lofty valuations, their role of gobbling up coins is allegedly so valuable that their premiums could rise for years to come.

Read more: Is MicroStrategy the bitcoin bank Hal Finney dreamed of?

Fisher in 1929, like MicroStrategy founder Michael Saylor in 2025, defended their trust-like inventions for “awakening people to the superiority of stocks over bonds and providing investors with a superior structure for gaining equity exposure.”

Saylor, indeed, talks endlessly about the role of his dilutive securities in defending the BTC from which they derive value.

In short, the comparison of BTC treasury stocks to the Roaring ‘20s bubble of public investment trusts is a fascinating lens through which to view some of the marketing rhetoric by digital asset promoters.