Shares of GameStop, the video game retailer that recently pivoted to Bitcoin investment, plummeted on Thursday after the company announced plans to raise $1.75 billion in debt financing from investors, it’s second such plan in the past few months. 

GameStop shares have tumbled 20% since the announcement, falling from $28.50 to $23.

While the company did not name Bitcoin specifically as a reason for the capital raise, it did say that the money would be used for “general corporate purposes, including making investments in a manner consistent with GameStop’s Investment Policy and potential acquisitions,” in a statement on Wednesday. 

In March, GameStop announced in March that it would be pivoting towards a business strategy that involved investing in “Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset.”

GameStop did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.

“A portion of our cash or future debt and equity issuances may be invested in Bitcoin,” the company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing. “We have not set a maximum amount of Bitcoin we may accumulate, and may sell any Bitcoin we may acquire.”

This $1.75 billion financing round comes after GameStop made its first Bitcoin purchase last month. The company acquired 4,710 Bitcoins—worth over $500 million at its current price—with funds raised in a similar debt financing round in April in which GameStop raised $1.5 billion. 

GameStop’s pivot to Bitcoin follows in the footsteps of Strategy, a veteran software company that began buying Bitcoin and holding it as a treasury asset in 2020. Since then, the company has seen its share price skyrocket more than 3,000%. 

But while Bitcoin purchases have been a boon for other companies, GameStop has problems that other companies don’t have. GameStop has struggled for years to keep up with customer’s shifting appetite from physical to digital video games. Because of this, the company’s sales decreased 28% between 2023 and 2024, falling from $5.3 billion to $3.8 billion. GameStop also shuttered a quarter of its locations last year and plans to continue closing stores throughout this year. 

GameStop investors have also repeatedly expressed skepticism about the company’s crypto plans. After GameStop’s initial announcement of its shift in strategy, the company’s shares slid 23%. After the company announced its first Bitcoin investment, the company’s shares slid 10%. 

As Bitcoin reaches new highs and is adopted as a treasury asset by the U.S. government, a growing number of non-crypto companies are pursuing Bitcoin investment as a way to boost their share price. Last week, K-pop media company K-Wave Media’s share price surged over 130% after it announced plans to acquire Bitcoin. More than 60 non-crypto companies are pursuing a “Bitcoin treasury strategy,” according to a recent report from the international bank Standard Chartered. 

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Dogecoin, a crypto memecoin that tends to fluctuate on Musk-related news, rebounded on Wednesday after tech billionaire Elon Musk backed down from an escalating feud with President Donald Trump. 

“I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week,” Musk posted on X early Wednesday morning. “They went too far.” 

Dogecoin popped 3% in the minutes that followed Musk’s apology, jumping from 19 cents to above 20 cents, according to Binance. The currency has pulled back slightly since the post but remains up 2%. By comparison, Bitcoin is up less than a tenth of a percent since the post. 

The price rebound comes after Dogecoin fell 11% to 17 cents last week, as Musk and Trump entered into a public feud on social media. The dispute between the world’s two most powerful people happened after Musk, who had concluded his time at the White House, took issue with the president’s spending bill, calling it “pork-filled” and a “disgusting abomination” in an X post on June 3. 

Trump fired back saying that the easiest way to mitigate government spending would be to “terminate Elon’s governmental subsidies and contracts” on Truth Social on June 5. 

In a since-deleted post, Musk responded by saying that his aerospace company SpaceX would begin “immediately decommissioning” its Dragon aircraft which shuttles people to and from the International Space Station. Musk walked back the statement later that day, but the two men continued to exchange barbs. 

The same day, Musk dropped what he called “a really big bomb,” claiming that Trump “is in the Epstein files,” in another since-deleted post on X. The “Epstein files” refers to documents the U.S. government collected during their investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that supposedly contained the names of his high-profile associates. Musk did not provide evidence to support his claims. 

Trump responded to Musk’s claims by posting a screenshot of Epstein’s former defense attorney David Shoen denying that Epstein had any information that would “hurt” the president. 

“I was hired to lead Jeffrey Epstein’s defense as his criminal lawyer for 9 days before he died,” Shoen wrote on X on June 5. “I can say authoritatively, unequivocally, and definitively that he has no information to hurt President Trump.”

Trump has also previously denied any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein. Last year, Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social: “I was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island.”

Musk-related news has a history of influencing the price of Dogecoin, the crypto industry’s first and most popular memecoin. The Tesla founder has repeatedly expressed his affinity for the currency over the years, proclaiming himself “Doge father” on SNL in 2021 and titling a federal agency the Department of Government Efficiency, or D.O.G.E. 

Dogecoin isn’t the only Musk-affiliated enterprise that took a hit in value during his war of words with the sitting president. Tesla’s share price dropped around 17.3% after Musk began feuding with Trump. It has rebounded since then, but still remains below its previous price. 

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OneBalance, a London-based crypto software company, has raised $20 million in a Series A led by venture capital firms cyber•Fund and Blockchain Capital, the company announced on Wednesday. The round included participation from Mirana Ventures and L2IV and brings the company’s total funding to $25 million. OneBalance declined to disclose its valuation in this round. 

OneBalance, founded in 2024, aims to build software that will make it possible for non-crypto native software engineers to build applications that use crypto, CEO Stephane Gosselin told Fortune. The company’s main product, which launched on Wednesday, is a toolkit—a collection of software tools and libraries—that lets developers integrate into applications the ability to trade memecoins, swap tokens, and facilitate peer-to-peer payments, among other things. 

“They [developers] can focus on their product and how to create the user experience, while having a reliable way to do transfers, swaps and earning yield,” Gosselin said.

With an increasing number of non-crypto companies—including Meta and Google—considering integrating stablecoins in some manner, Gosselin says software like his will make it easier for companies to add blockchain technology to their services. 

“They don’t necessarily know how to be able to execute reliability on-chain and the last thing they want to do is start to expose a lot of that complexity to their users,” Gosselin said.

The toolkit launched with support for Ethereum, Polygon, and other ethereum-virtual machine blockchains. OneBalance will introduce support for Solana at the end of this month, the company said. 

OneBalance will charge a fee on each transaction processed by a platform that integrates the toolkit, Gosselin said. “We want to make money when our customers make money,” Gosselin said. “If our customers decide to monetize and to do this with us, then we will keep a small fee on top of that.” 

OneBalance is among a number of crypto companies seeking to make application development simpler. Reown and Privy, for instance, both offer standard developer kits, or SDKs, that aim to make it easier for engineers to integrate crypto wallet functionality into their applications. Another example is Helius, a developer platform focused on eliminating complexities for application engineers trying to build on the Solana blockchain. 

Gosselin says his company will use the money raised in this round to expand the capabilities of its flagship product by integrating functionality for additional blockchains.

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An increasing number of mainstream companies are experimenting with blockchain technology, according to a new report. 

Around 60% of Fortune 500 executives say their companies are “working on blockchain initiatives,” according to a new survey published by crypto exchange Coinbase on Tuesday, in partnership with GLG Research. That’s a 4% increase from last year. Many of these crypto projects are related to the use of blockchain technology for payments and settlements, supply chain management, and blockchain infrastructure. 

GLG Research and Coinbase did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.

The latest data comes as a new political climate has made the idea of blockchain more interesting to mainstream U.S. corporations. President Donald Trump has supported the idea of a clear regulatory framework for crypto, and has been much more supportive of the industry than President Biden. 

The industry has also experienced a recent IPO boom. This month, Circle—a major company that issues a stablecoin called USDC, which is pegged to the value of the U.S. Dollar—went public with an $8 billion valuation. Other crypto companies have also recently filed to go public or are reportedly considering it, including crypto exchanges Gemini and Kraken.

Since the start of the year, a number of financial companies have announced that they are using or experimenting with stablecoins including asset manager Fidelity, global payments company Visa and fintech company Stripe. 

Other tech companies are jumping on the stablecoin trend as well. Social media platform X, AirBnB and Google are all in early conversations about integrating stablecoins into their business operations. And in May, Fortune reported that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta—which has unsuccessfully experimented with blockchain technology in the past—has been in discussions with crypto companies to introduce the use of stablecoins for payouts. 

An increasing number of mainstream companies are experimenting with blockchain technology, according to a new report. 

Around 60% of Fortune 500 executives say their companies are “working on blockchain initiatives,” according to a new survey published by crypto exchange Coinbase on Tuesday, in partnership with GLG Research. That’s a 4% increase from last year. Many of these crypto projects are related to the use of blockchain technology for payments and settlements, supply chain management, and blockchain infrastructure. 

GLG Research and Coinbase did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.

The latest data comes as a new political climate has made the idea of blockchain more interesting to mainstream U.S. corporations. President Donald Trump has supported the idea of a clear regulatory framework for crypto, and has been much more supportive of the industry than President Biden. 

The industry has also experienced a recent IPO boom. This month, Circle—a major company that issues a stablecoin called USDC, which is pegged to the value of the U.S. Dollar—went public with an $8 billion valuation. Other crypto companies have also recently filed to go public or are reportedly considering it, including crypto exchanges Gemini and Kraken.

Since the start of the year, a number of financial companies have announced that they are using or experimenting with stablecoins including asset manager Fidelity, global payments company Visa and fintech company Stripe. 

Other tech companies are jumping on the stablecoin trend as well. Social media platform X, AirBnB and Google are all in early conversations about integrating stablecoins into their business operations. And in May, Fortune reported that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta—which has unsuccessfully experimented with blockchain technology in the past—has been in discussions with crypto companies to introduce the use of stablecoins for payouts. 

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BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), the largest Bitcoin exchange-traded fund on the market, has attracted $70 billion in total assets more quickly than any other ETF, adding a new milestone to its long list of accomplishments. 

BlackRock’s IBIT, the most popular of 12 available Bitcoin ETFs, set the record on Monday, 341 days after its debut, according to Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas. IBIT reached that mark, “5x faster than the old record held by GLD of 1,691 days,” Balchunas wrote on X, referring to asset manager State Street’s famous gold ETF. 

While other asset managers like Fidelity and VanEck also offer Bitcoin ETFs, BlackRock’s version is the largest by far. After IBIT’s $70 billion in total assets, Fidelity’s FBTC comes in second with $20 billion and Grayscale’s GBTC comes in third with just under $20 billion. 

ETFs are a type of investment vehicle, traded on the stock market, that track the price of one or more underlying assets. The fees ETF issuers charge are usually less than mutual funds and offer a simple way to diversify an investment portfolio. Before the introduction of crypto ETFs last year, Invesco’s QQQ trust ETF, which tracks the Nasdaq, and Vanguard’s VOO ETF, which tracks the S&P 500, were among the most popular. 

IBIT and 10 other Bitcoin ETFs from various companies launched at the beginning of last year after gaining long-awaited regulatory approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The debut of the first Bitcoin ETFs showcased strong investor demand for access to the cryptocurrency’s price movements, with IBIT accumulating over $1 billion in assets under management within its first four days on the market. 

By November, BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF had surpassed its gold fund in total assets, becoming the largest of the 1,400 funds the asset manager offers globally. 

But, the record-breaking did not slow down after that. In December, IBIT became the fastest ETF to hit $50 billion in assets under management, five times quicker than BlackRock’s iShares Core MSCI EAFE ETF which took nearly four years and invests in companies outside of the U.S. and Canada, according to Balchunas.  

“IBIT’s growth is unprecedented,” Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart told the outlet at the time. “It’s the fastest ETF to reach most milestones, faster than any other ETF in any asset class.” 

Since their launch last January, increased flows into Bitcoin ETFs have coincided with increases in the currency’s price. For example, as Bitcoin hit an all-time of $111,900 in late May, the total net assets across all twelve Bitcoin ETFs reached an all-time high of over $134 billion. 

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Bitcoin leapt to $108,000 on Monday, after hovering near $105,000 for most of the weekend, as top U.S and Chinese officials get ready to meet in London this week in the hopes of salvaging a fraying trade deal. 

Bitcoin gained 2% on Monday, according to Binance, briefly touching $108,900 before falling slightly. The bump comes as investors express optimism about the potential for a resolution of trade disputes between the U.S. and one of its largest trading partners. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and China’s vice premier for economic policy He Lifeng will lead their respective delegations in negotiations that are expected to begin Monday and continue into Tuesday, according to the New York Times.

This week’s talks are part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign to force U.S. trading partners to concede to various demands by threatening to impose hefty tariffs on foreign imports. After Trump announced a sweeping tariff policy in April that would affect nearly all U.S. trading partners, the president authorized a 90-day pause to allow time for negotiations. 

However, the pause did not include tariffs on China, which were raised to 145%. The policy triggered retaliatory levies from China and led many investors to flee American markets, fearing the consequences of a potential trade war. Bitcoin fell to a yearly low of $75,000 as tensions between the nations escalated.

After a summit in Geneva last month, Trump reversed course and announced on May 12 that the U.S. and China had reached an agreement in which the two nations would temporarily lower their tariffs and hold additional talks to reduce tensions. Bitcoin surged to an all-time high of $111,000 on May 22, following news of the deal. 

But the truce did not last long. Trump accused China of reneging on the deal over a dispute about Chinese exports of rare earth magnets. Trump wrote on Truth Social on May 30: “China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!”  

In an effort to salvage the fraying trade deal, Trump and Xi talked over the phone for the first time in months last week. Following the 90-minute call, Trump announced that top officials from both countries would meet in London this week to resume negotiations. 

Other factors that may be contributing to Bitcoin’s price surge are an increase in crypto-related IPOs. Last week, stablecoin giant Circle went public on the New York Stock Exchange and saw its shares pop over 168%, jumping from $31 to $69 within the first day of trading. Gemini, a crypto exchange founded by the Winklevoss twins, also filed for an IPO on Friday, in another example of the crypto industry becoming more intertwined with traditional finance. 

“While the IPO bump is likely short-term excitement, the long-term institutional positioning leads us to be bullish about Bitcoin’s continued performance in 2025,” David Siemer, CEO of crypto asset management company Wave Digital Assets, told Fortune. 

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