Investing in crypto isn’t limited to buying the digital coins themselves. Here’s how to gain indirect exposure to crypto through the stocks of crypto companies.
Buying crypto no longer means choosing between owning coins directly and sitting out. Dozens of publicly traded companies now generate most of their revenue from digital assets, and you can hold them in any standard brokerage account, including an IRA or 401(k), where buying crypto directly is often difficult or impossible.
What counts as a “crypto stock” has widened considerably since the last cycle. The sector now spans several distinct business models:
Exchanges and brokerages. Companies that earn trading fees and custody revenue, such as Coinbase (COIN), Robinhood (HOOD) and Bullish (BLSH).
Stablecoin and payments infrastructure. Issuers and processors like Circle (CRCL), Block (XYZ) and PayPal (PYPL), whose revenue is tied to transaction volume and reserve interest rather than token prices.
Miners and compute providers. Bitcoin miners including MARA Holdings (MARA), Riot Platforms (RIOT), IREN (IREN) and TeraWulf (WULF) — many of which now lease a growing share of their power and data center capacity to AI customers.
Treasury companies. Firms that hold crypto as a primary balance sheet asset, led by Strategy (MSTR) and the wave of bitcoin, ether and Solana treasury vehicles that followed it.
Chipmakers and hardware. Suppliers such as NVIDIA (NVDA), AMD (AMD) and Canaan (CAN), which sell into both crypto mining and AI.
Online trading platforms to buy the best crypto stocks
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Top Crypto Stocks
Finder’s investments experts analyze all S&P 500-listed stocks to curate a list of the best performing stocks. The companies are ranked in average order of both their year-to-date and month-over-month performance.
Why invest in crypto stocks?
Investing in digital assets poses certain risks that aren’t associated with investing in crypto stocks. Investing in crypto stocks allows you to gain exposure to the crypto market without having to purchase digital assets directly.
One risk with buying crypto directly is that you can potentially lose access to your crypto assets if you leave them in the custody of a centralized crypto exchange or platform that goes bust, as we saw in the cases of FTX and Celsius.
Another risk is that you could lose the private keys to your digital assets if you hold them in a non-custodial wallet, which would permanently disable you from accessing the assets.
When you invest in crypto stocks, neither of these risks are present. Crypto stocks give you exposure to the crypto market or its underlying blockchain technology without the unique risks associated with owning crypto directly.
Benefits of cryptocurrency stocks
In addition to eliminating some of the unique risks associated with investing in crypto directly, crypto stocks tend to perform very well in bull markets.
For example, since most markets have rebounded after the broader bear market of 2022, which negatively affected most asset classes, crypto stocks have done exceptionally well.
Stocks like Coinbase Global (COIN) and MicroStrategy (MSTR) are both up over 200% YTD, while some crypto miner stocks like Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA) and Riot Platforms Inc (RIOT) are up over 300% YTD.
If you’re looking to add some risk to your portfolio during a bull market without buying digital coins themselves, you might consider investing in crypto stocks.
Also, you can invest in crypto stocks via most types of 401(k)s and IRAs, while it’s more difficult to invest in crypto directly in a retirement account.
Risks of cryptocurrency stocks
Like crypto assets themselves, crypto stocks are quite volatile.
Many crypto stocks perform better than a benchmark index like the S&P 500 during bull markets but fall in value much more than the S&P 500 during bear markets.
For example, Block (SQ) increased about 780% in value from March 2020 to November 2021, while the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) — the ETF that tracks the S&P 500 — increased approximately 215% in the same period. Then, from November 2021 until November 2022, SQ lost about 75% of its value, while the SPY only lost 33%.
It’s also important to note that companies like Applied Digital Corp (APLD) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) could eventually pivot out of producing devices for crypto mining and focus more on producing devices for artificial intelligence (AI) machines. Or MicroStrategy (MSTR) could decide to sell its BTC holdings. If such things were to happen, it might still be profitable to remain invested in these companies, but you wouldn’t necessarily have exposure to the crypto market by continuing to hold these stocks.
If you are new to investing and have a low risk tolerance, you might want to think twice before investing in crypto stocks.
Frequently asked questions
Crypto stocks are shares in publicly traded companies whose business is tied to digital assets. That includes exchanges like Coinbase (COIN), stablecoin issuers like Circle (CRCL), bitcoin miners like MARA Holdings (MARA) and Riot Platforms (RIOT), treasury companies like Strategy (MSTR), and chipmakers that supply mining and blockchain infrastructure. Buying one gives you exposure to the crypto economy through a regular brokerage account, but you don't own any cryptocurrency yourself.
Often, but not always, and rarely one-for-one. Treasury companies and pure-play miners tend to track bitcoin closely because their assets or revenue are denominated in it, and they frequently move more sharply in both directions. Exchanges are tied more to trading volume than to price, and companies with diversified revenue — payment processors, chipmakers, miners leasing capacity to AI customers — can move independently of the crypto market entirely.
No. When you buy a crypto stock, you own equity in a company, with all the usual risks that come with it: management decisions, debt, dilution from share issuance and earnings misses. You're also exposed to that company's business model rather than to a token's price directly. A miner can be unprofitable while bitcoin rises, and a treasury company's share price can trade at a premium or discount to the value of the crypto it holds.
It depends on whether you want concentrated or diversified exposure. A spot bitcoin ETF tracks the coin's price with no company-specific risk attached. Crypto equity ETFs like BLOK and BITQ spread your money across dozens of crypto-linked companies. Individual stocks give you the most upside if you pick correctly and the most downside if you don't, since a single company can underperform even during a strong crypto market.
Yes. Crypto stocks trade on the NYSE and Nasdaq like any other equity, so most IRA providers and employer 401(k) plans allow them, subject to whatever investment menu your plan offers. This is one of the main reasons investors use them: holding cryptocurrency itself in a retirement account usually requires a specialized self-directed custodian.
Miners already own the two things AI companies are short of: cheap power contracts and built-out data center space. Converting or expanding that capacity into high-performance computing leases gives them contracted, recurring revenue instead of income that rises and falls with bitcoin's price and mining difficulty. Several of the largest miners have signed multi-year compute deals, which has meaningfully reduced how closely their shares track bitcoin.
A treasury company is a business that holds cryptocurrency as a primary balance sheet asset, typically funded by issuing debt or new shares. Strategy (MSTR) pioneered the model, and companies have since built treasuries around ether, Solana and other tokens. The structure can amplify returns when prices rise, but leverage works in both directions, and shares can trade below the value of the underlying holdings when sentiment turns.
Most don't. Crypto-native companies typically reinvest cash into infrastructure, acquisitions or token purchases rather than returning it to shareholders. Some larger, diversified companies with crypto exposure do pay a dividend, but the payout is usually small relative to the share price and isn't a reason to buy the stock on its own.
Any US brokerage that offers NYSE and Nasdaq-listed equities, which is nearly all of them. If you want crypto stocks and cryptocurrency in the same account, brokers including Robinhood, eToro, Webull and Interactive Brokers support both. Compare options on our guide to the best brokerage accounts.
Frank Corva is business-to-business (B2B) correspondent for Bitcoin Magazine and formerly the cryptocurrency writer and analyst for digital assets at Finder. Frank has turned his hobby of studying and writing about crypto into a career with a mission of educating the world about this burgeoning sector of finance. He worked in Ghana and Venezuela before earning a degree in applied linguistics at Teachers College, Columbia University. He also taught writing and entertainment business courses in Japan and worked with UNICEF in Namibia before returning to the US to teach at universities in New York City. Earlier in his career, he spent years working as a publicist and graphic designer for record labels like Warner Music Group and Triple Crown Records. During that time, he was also a music journalist whose writing and photography was in published in Alternative Press, Spin and other outlets.
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