Turns out, buying Bitcoin to boost your share price might not be the corporate panacea that it once seemed.

In recent weeks, companies such as Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., have announced plans to use their cash — sometimes borrowed — to plow into Bitcoin, joining a growing list of firms adopting an approach pioneered by Strategy’s Michael Saylor.

While most have initially seen their shares skyrocket, outperforming the value of their underlying crypto holdings, there are growing signs that they’re starting to lose their speculative premium.

The medical technology company Semler Scientific, Inc. and Goodfood Market Corp., a meal-kit provider, both rose faster than Bitcoin when they initially decided to follow Strategy’s playbook last year. But both companies have badly lagged cryptocurrency prices during the boom of the last two months. Even Strategy itself has only gone up 1.5 times as much over the last two months.

The early boom in this ecosystem seemed to arise in part from the financial engineering that Strategy pioneered, and in part from the allure of novel products for crypto-pilled traders. Over time, though, some investors have realized that paying a company to buy Bitcoin might be less efficient than buying the token itself.

RIA Advisors Portfolio Manager Michael Lebowitz said that at first the “speculative crowd” has “wanted to take advantage of anything that’s Bitcoin.”

“But after that,” he added, “the Bitcoin-related buying demand goes away and the demand fades.”

Now, some companies aren’t even getting the initial pop that once seemed so easy. The recent underperformance casts a shadow over the broader rush to follow Strategy. The biggest new name is Twenty One Capital Inc., which is setting out to accumulate billions of dollars of cryptocurrency holdings with support from Cantor Fitzgerald LP, SoftBank Group and the stablecoin issuer Tether Holdings SA.

There have also been a host of smaller companies jumping in, some of them looking to buy alternative cryptocurrencies like Solana and President Trump’s memecoin, $Trump.

To be sure, the Strategy imitators are all getting into the cryptocurrency game in different ways and their stocks have not followed the same patterns over time. Some, like Twenty One Capital, are emulating Strategy and building an entire company focused on cryptocurrency investing. Others are doing this alongside their existing businesses, which can create a distracting split focus.

Goodfood, for example, has pushed ahead with its meal-kit delivery. The Canadian company’s stock has declined 68% since it adopted its Bitcoin treasury plan in January of this year. A Goodfood representative said the decline was due to the Canadian economy and its decision to return money to shareholders, not its Bitcoin investments.

“Our goal is to really make sure that we work on our core business and have that generate cash flow, and then provide the kind of cash that would enable more Bitcoin investments,” the representative said.

Others have continued to reap benefits, especially those operating outside the US. Japan-based Metaplanet, which sold its hotel holdings to pay for Bitcoin, has done 17 times better than Bitcoin this year. In some countries, stocks like Metaplanet are more easily accessible than Bitcoin itself.

Among US players, some of the variability has been related to the willingness to adopt Strategy’s most risky practice — borrowing money to buy Bitcoin. Strategy has already issued around $8 billion in convertible bonds over the past year and has announced plans to raise $84 billion through shares and debt to buy Bitcoin.

In addition to offering a cheap source of funding, these bonds have made Strategy attractive to hedge funds that use a complicated form of arbitrage that capitalizes on the volatility of the stock. This initially allowed Strategy to pay almost nothing to borrow money, but the rates it is paying have been going up more recently.

The returns have been even more disappointing for other companies that have decided to issue debt to purchase cryptocurrencies.

The $85 million in convertible notes that Semler Scientific issued in January, are now down 18%, while the company’s shares have declined about the same amount this year.

Semler did not respond to a request for comment.

This weakness could eventually create problems for Bitcoin itself. The companies buying the cryptocurrency have created a virtuous circle in which rising share prices have allowed them to purchase more digital tokens, helping push Bitcoin to a recent all-time high above $110,000. But if the stocks start dropping, they may need to sell their Bitcoin, especially those that have to make payments on the debt they took out to buy Bitcoin.

“You do run the risk that if enough companies have it, and Bitcoin for whatever reason drops a lot, that those companies’ stocks get hit and then they have to sell it for whatever reason, and it just creates this spiral effect,” Lebowitz said.

So far, this has not dimmed the appetite. Strategy purchased $427 million of Bitcoin in late May. But even here, the diminishing returns were evident. When Strategy announced it was buying 27,200 tokens last November, its shares rose 26% the same day. On the first trading day after Strategy’s purchase announcement in late May, the stock rose less than 1%.

“I think MicroStrategy will still be the king, but you have to think that the trade follows some sort of asymptotic curve where it caps out,” Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matthew Hougan said in an interview.

--With assistance from Yiqin Shen.

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