Another Publicly Traded Firm Starts Stockpiling Bitcoin

Another Nasdaq-listed company is adopting the increasingly fashionable Bitcoin standard. 

Real estate tech company Fathom Holdings (NASDAQ: FTHM) announced Thursday that it will allocate up to half of its excess cash reserves to the orange coin after the firm’s board approved the move. 

And further down the line, the company hopes to accept Bitcoin from customers for purchases. It added that it would start buying Bitcoin—and perhaps via Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, or ETFs—in the next two weeks. 

Fathom CFO Joanne Zach said: “The integration of Bitcoin into commercial and financial strategies has accelerated across financial markets, positioning it as both a hedge against inflation and a safeguard against economic and currency risks in the global economy.”

Fathom is a real estate firm that also dabbles in cloud computing services. 

It isn’t the first company to put Bitcoin on its balance sheet—over the past year, many small Nasdaq-listed companies have started following in the footsteps of software firm MicroStrategy.

MicroStrategy first bought Bitcoin in 2020, and now holds over $47 billion worth, making it the largest corporate treasury holder of the asset. The firm has been urging companies to follow in its footsteps as its market cap has grown exponentially. 

The company’s shares have exploded in value and MicroStrategy last year became a Nasdaq-100 firm, joining the top 100 non-financial companies on the Nasdaq stock market. 

Now the price of Bitcoin has hit new highs, and buying the asset has never been easier via the new ETFs, other companies are following suit. 

Health care companies Semler Scientific and Cosmos Health, as well as auto firm Worksport, are some of the firms that have bought the asset as an inflation hedge.

Fathom’s stock rose about 5% from the close of trading Wednesday—ahead of the announcement—to Friday’s close, at a price of $1.39.

Edited by Andrew Hayward