Among other things, the year 2025 will surely be remembered for the mania and then surprising collapse of hastily formed bitcoin treasury companies that attempted to mirror the success of Michael Saylor’s strategy. Perhaps none had a higher profile than KindlyMD (NAKA), run by David Bailey, the highly successful former CEO of Bitcoin magazine and the Bitcoin whisperer in Donald Trump’s victorious presidential campaign.
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Then KindlyMD, a little-known microcap healthcare company, announced in May a merger deal with Bailey’s Nakamoto Holdings, backed by more than $700 million in financing, to start a bitcoin treasury company. Shares of Kindly (then under the symbol KIND, but soon changed to NAKA) skyrocketed from around $2 to over $30 in a matter of days. That was the peak.
Despite Bailey’s campaign of running bullish announcements almost non-stop on X, NAKA stock fell over the spring and summer even as the price of bitcoin rose. With the completion of the merger in mid-August, things got really ugly. When the first investors were able to sell their shares about a month later, they did so. Bailey, in one of the most curious moves ever made by the CEO of a public company, even encouraged it. “To those shareholders who have been looking for a deal, I encourage you to leave,” he wrote in a September letter. Exit they made.
Trading at around $0.45 this week, KindlyMD shares are down about 99% from their high and are worth about 25% of what they were getting before the merger deal with Bailey’s Nakamoto Holdings.
