| David Pan sizes up the crowds of Michael Saylor copycats trying to tap capital markets. A growing fleet of Saylors | Michael Saylor made securities related to his company Strategy the hottest trade on Wall Street last year thanks to the company’s multibillion dollar exposure to Bitcoin and a historic bull run in the crypto market. Now a wave of public companies are trying to repeat that success. While that has likely helped Bitcoin reclaim the $100,000 mark, it’s also creating an increasingly crowded field of hedge-fund-like proxies for the original digital asset in the US stock market. Bitcoin miners, a flurry of obscure small-cap companies and public firms newly formed by crypto heavyweights are offering anything from convertible bonds to preferred stocks, giving different flavors of Bitcoin exposure to investors. While Strategy has raised billions of dollars from such crypto-linked securities to fund its Bitcoin purchases, it has had to sweeten some of the more recent deals to entice investors who now have more. Convertible bonds have been one of the main ways for Strategy to raise capital. However, the company juiced potential returns for buyers with a lower conversion premium in February while its preferred stock offering in the prior month saw a hefty discount. Issuance of convertible debt to buy Bitcoin as a whole has also slowed down in recent weeks. A number of new entrants may tip such deals further into lenders’ favor. An affiliate of Cantor Fitzgerald LP is working with stablecoin issuer Tether Holdings SA and SoftBank Group to launch Twenty One Capital Inc., a company that emulates Strategy’s business model. A subsidiary of Srtive Enterprises Inc. co-founded by Vivek Ramaswamy is merging with Nasdaq-listed Asset Entities Inc. to form a Bitcoin treasury company. The struggling video-game retail GameStop Corp., which became a favorite of retail traders during the meme stock frenzy in 2021, said in March its board has approved a plan to add Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset. In addition, Strategy has doubled its original capital raising plan to $84 billion, aiming to sell another $21 billion in common shares and raise the same amount in debt. That is even after the company posted a record first-quarter loss that resulted from an accounting change that requires it to value its Bitcoin holdings at market prices. In the meantime, Bitcoin mining companies are likely set to ramp up debt financing as the rout in their share prices makes it difficult to sell stock for fresh capital. It all adds up to a staggering amount of securities issuance related to exposure to the same underlying asset: Bitcoin. If equities markets start to wobble again amid uncertainty about President Donald Trump’s trade war, that amount of supply could end up being too big of an ask of investors. | 
