Navigating crypto exposures in a volatile world
While BTC’s year-to-date price drop resembles that of the S&P 500, some crypto stocks have fared way worse
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Markets have clearly been quite volatile in recent weeks — crypto or otherwise.
Zooming out, the S&P 500 was down nearly 9% year-to-date early Wednesday, and the Nasdaq Composite index has fared worse, dropping 14% so far in 2025.
As BTC hovered around $83,700 Wednesday morning, it was similarly down 10% year-to-date. Gold is up 24% over that span, flaunting a safe-haven status that BTC does not yet widely enjoy.
Shares of Strategy (formerly known as MicroStrategy) have rallied in recent days, putting it barely into the green in 2025 (at +2%). But perhaps the most renowned crypto stock, Coinbase, remains down about 34% from the start of the year.
Crypto assets and stocks have been in a sort of “air pocket,” as reality replaces post-election enthusiasm with the reminder that some of the bigger changes for the space will take time, Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer told me.
Legislation — on market structure and stablecoins — will be key before institutional investors feel comfortable engaging with the space in earnest, he argued.
“The stock prices of companies like Strategy and Coinbase continue to be heavily influenced by retail investors and hedge funds that are more inclined to trade out of their positions than long-term institutional holders whose mandates often cause them to sit tight during market downturns,” Palmer added.
Blockspace’s Colin Harper — for a piece in Blockworks’ Forward Guidance newsletter last week — wrote about how bitcoin mining stocks are not as correlated to BTC as they once were.
Large miners like Marathon Digital and Core Scientific are down 28% and 54% YTD, respectively.
Palmer puts miners into two camps: those involved in building/managing AI data centers and the pure-play BTC miners, with both representing emerging technology plays.
“During a sharp downturn, those visions of future upside can be pushed aside as investor horizons shrink and there is more focus on necessities and staples and stocks with attractive dividend yields,” the Benchmark analyst noted.
Dan Weiskopf, co-portfolio manager of the Amplify Transformational Data Sharing ETF (BLOK), acknowledged the “brutal” Q1 for miners. Still, the fund bought into the recent IPO of AI cloud provider CoreWeave. And CleanSpark (down 25% YTD) is BLOK’s seventh-largest holding.
“We do not believe that the AI/datacenter trend is a bubble and would expect a sizable relief to take form when markets lean more towards risk again,” Weiskopf told me.
Robinhood and Coinbase are BLOK’s second- and third-largest holdings, respectively. Weiskopf called the innovation of these companies exciting — “especially in the context of a friendlier SEC.”
Cantor Fitzgerald analysts are similarly bullish on COIN. T. Rowe Price portfolio manager Dominic Rizzo has said that while he considers Coinbase to be an industry “linchpin” (and his tech fund holds the stock), he doesn’t view Strategy or miners the same way.
BLOK’s number one holding? That would be MSTR. After Strategy’s latest bitcoin buy, the company owns 531,644 BTC (acquired for ~$67,556 per coin)
“We think MSTR’s growth rate deserves a premium to traditional multiples of book, especially when the book value is so easy to measure,” Weiskopf said. “A lot can happen in the future and this does not mean that we don’t trade around our position.”
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