Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Take the Crypto Out of the Indexes

Programming note: Money Stuff is off the rest of the week. Happy Thanksgiving!

Crypto in indexes

For a while, you could sell $1 of crypto on the US stock market for $2. You could take a tiny public company with a stock market listing but little or no operating business, merge it with a pot of, say, $100 million of Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency, and sell shares of the pot at a $200 million valuation. This is called a “digital asset treasury company,” and it was a great trade and a lot of companies did it, though in recent ...