GameStop Buys $512M Worth of BTC For Bitcoin Treasury

Video game retailer turned meme stock GameStop has announced that it has purchased Bitcoin, currently worth approximately $512 million.

The firm tweeted that it had purchased 4,710 BTC, after having completed a $1.5 billion offering of convertible senior notes to investors in early April.

At the time, GameStop stated that it planned to use the proceeds to establish a corporate Bitcoin treasury; while not explicitly stated in the Wednesday release, it is likely the $512.79 million Bitcoin acquisition is for this planned reserve.

GameStop did not immediately reply to Decrypt’s request for comment.

In March, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen hinted at the retailer's Bitcoin plans as he posed next to Strategy co-founder and Executive Chairman Michael Saylor, who established the business model of public companies holding Bitcoin as an asset.

As a result of Strategy's embrace of Bitcoin, it transformed from a middling business intelligence software company to a firm with a market capitalization of $101.76 billion, according to TradingView. It appears that GameStop is looking to adopt a similar strategy, hoping for comparable success.

In a brief interview at the Bitcoin 2025 conference on Wednesday, following the announcement, Cohen said that Bitcoin was among assets that could help the firm weather economic shifts.

"If the thesis is correct, then Bitcoin and gold, as well, can be a hedge against global currency devaluation and systemic risk," he said.

Asked when GameStop would buy additional Bitcoin, Cohen replied that the firm is "not going to call our shots in advance," and said that GameStop is "not following anyone else's strategy."

Firms follow Strategy's Bitcoin playbook

GameStop isn’t the first public company to follow in Strategy’s footsteps. Crypto mining firms Marathon Digital Holdings Inc., Riot Platforms Inc., and CleanSpark all hold billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin each, while Elon Musk’s Tesla also holds $1.25 billion of Bitcoin as of December 2024.

The 10 Public Companies With the Biggest Bitcoin Portfolios

For many years, the idea that publicly traded corporations might buy Bitcoin for their reserves was considered laughable. The top cryptocurrency was considered too volatile, too fringe to be embraced by any serious business. That taboo has been well and truly broken, with a number of major institutional investors buying up Bitcoin in recent years. The floodgates first opened when cloud software company Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) bought $425 million worth of Bitcoin in August and September...

And firms are branching out beyond Bitcoin for their corporate treasuries, too. On Tuesday, SharpLink Gaming, an online gambling marketer, raised $425 million to buy Ethereum for its treasury, with Consensys CEO and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin joining the company’s board of directors. (Disclosure: Consensys is one of 22 investors in an editorially independent Decrypt.)

What is GameStop?

Video game retailer GameStop found itself at the heart of a stock market phenomenon in 2021, when Redditors who believed its stock was undervalued fought in the markets against hedge fund short sellers. Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, shot to fame as the leader of this movement, after taking to social media to protest the short sellers.

As a result, GME’s stock price skyrocketed due to a massive short squeeze sparked by the online buzz.

Who Is Roaring Kitty, and What Does His Return Mean for Crypto?

Financial analyst turned stock and meme influencer Roaring Kitty has roared back onto social media. His surprise return to Twitter in May didn’t even directly mention GameStop—the stock whose rollercoaster ride sparked global headlines and a documentary film—but nonetheless prompted the price of GME to double briefly and preceded a 1,900% surge in a Solana-based tribute coin also named GME. What’s the connection between Roaring Kitty—whose real name is Keith Gill—the failed video game retailer,...

Since then, GameStop has traded as a "meme stock," with its price fluctuations tied to social media hype. When Roaring Kitty posted a vague meme to social media after years of silence, GME more than doubled in price from market close on Friday to the Monday open—a massive surge in demand that prompted Nasdaq to halt trading nine times in one morning.

In the Bitcoin 2025 interview Wednesday, Cohen said that when he joined GameStop in 2021, "the company was a piece of crap and losing a lot of money." He added that GameStop "was under a lot of pressure, moving from physical games to digital downloads."

Additional reporting by Logan Hitchcock

Editor's note: This story was updated after publication to include comments from Cohen from Bitcoin 2025.