The Conversation Weekly23 Okt 2025

Bitcoin buys: the risks and rewards of companies buying crypto

One American company called Strategy owns more than 3% of all bitcoin in existence. In August 2020, its executive chairman, Michael Saylor, pioneered a new business model where publicly listed companies buy cryptocurrency assets to hold on their balance sheet.

More than 100 other public companies have since followed Saylor’s lead and become bitcoin treasury companies, together holding more than $114 billion of bitcoin. There’s been a new rush into crypto treasury assets in 2025 following the general crypto enthusiasm of the new Trump administration.

But holding bitcoin assets also comes with some big risks, particularly given the volatility of cryptocurrency prices, and the share prices of some of these companies are now coming under pressure.

In this episode, we speak to Larisa Yarovaya, director of the centre for digital finance at the University of Southampton in the UK, about whether bitcoin treasury companies are the future of corporate finance, or another speculative bubble waiting to burst.

This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware with assistance from Katie Flood. Mixing by Michelle Macklem and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the f ull credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.

If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(297)

Can we ever fully trust AI agents?

As more incidents emerge of AI agents going rogue during testing, can we fully trust them?In the latest hack, Australia revealed OpenAI agents hacked into a government database containing healthcare d...

24 Sep 23min

Australia's 'barking mad' bet on nuclear submarines

The multi-billion dollar AUKUS defence deal between the US, UK and Australia is one of the most significant in our modern history.The three countries wanted to curb China’s growing military presence i...

17 Sep 20min

Ratko Mladić: the war criminal who became a martyr for Bosnian Serbs

To most of the world, former Bosnian Serb military general Ratko Mladić was a brutal war criminal whose actions during the Bosnian War killed thousands. For others, he was a martyr who defended the Se...

10 Sep 16min

Inside the booming ‘shadow fleet’ industry keeping rogue states afloat

It’s the middle of the night in April 2023 in the East China Sea.A North Korean-linked oil tanker sailing under another country’s flag suddenly goes dark. It stops transmitting its location and simply...

3 Sep 21min

The music that made Dolly Parton a global icon

It was 1967, and country musician Porter Wagoner was introducing a guest on his weekly TV show.The camera cuts to a woman with big, blonde beehive, wearing a magenta mini dress with the same shade of ...

31 Aug 20min

How Ukraine is bringing the war home to Russia

In recent weeks, Ukrainian drones have targeted large warehouses across Russia, destroying millions of dollars of merchandise stored inside them.These warehouses and logistics hubs belong to Wildberri...

27 Aug 18min

How Timor-Leste is fighting back against Asia’s scamming gangs

🔁 Rerun: originally published 12/12/25. We're revisiting this episode as we take a quick break but we'll be back next week with a new instalment of The Conversation Weekly. Oecusse, a rugged, remote ...

20 Aug 24min

Loonies and bins: Britain's long love affair with novelty politics

It's pretty grim when your main political opponent is a man with a bin for a head.That's the situation that's faced Nigel Farage in the Clacton byelection in the UK.Count Binface has pledged to nation...

13 Aug 23min