By Brian Swint

Cryptocurrencies were rising across the board early Wednesday after GameStop, the videogame retailer that became famous for being a favorite pick of retail investors during the Covid-19 pandemic, said it would invest in Bitcoin.

The company's board unanimously approved the update to its investment policy to include Bitcoin, the oldest and biggest crypto, as a treasury reserve asset. That makes the company, who has long struggled to sell physical copies of videogames amid the shift to digital distribution, more like MicroStrategy, a company that buys cryptocurrencies as the main part of its business plan. That may encourage other crypto investors who see companies buying digital assets for reserves as a sign of robust demand.

More broadly, crypto is benefiting from a few days of risk-on sentiment -- when investors are buying riskier assets such as technology stocks. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq both rose on Tuesday, led by the so-called Magnificent Seven large-cap tech names of Amazon, Apple, Google-parent Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla, and Facebook-parent Meta Platforms.

The question is whether the rally can hold. Bitcoin is still down more than 5% since the start of the year and well below the highs hit in late January. The S&P 500 has also given up its gains for the year after big advances a few months ago.

Bitcoin rose 2.1% over the past 24 hours to $88,277. XRP, the crypto used to settle transactions on the Ripple exchange, added 1.9%. Ethereum, Solana, and Cardano were up 0.9%, 3.8%, and 4.5%, respectively.

GameStop was the best-known meme stock of the early 2020s. Meme Stocks were called that because their prices were driven up by widely spread social media posts, rather than any fundamentals about the business. Meme stocks became popular among ordinary investors, who were working against larger institutions that had bet on the share prices to fall.

Write to Brian Swint at brian.swint@barrons.com

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March 26, 2025 05:17 ET (09:17 GMT)

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