According to Cointelegraph: Japan's Metaplanet, which replicates MicroStrategy's Bitcoin investment strategy, has seen its shares surge 158% over the past week, making it the top gainer among all Japanese stocks. The firm's share price now stands at 93 Japanese yen, a 127% increase over the past two days. The exceptional rise prompted the Tokyo Stock Exchange to halt trading of Metaplanet's shares twice last week.
The investment firm currently verges on a $1 billion market cap, now at roughly $940 million. Following the announcement of its Bitcoin investment strategy on April 8, Metaplanet has since accumulated 117.7 Bitcoin, valued at approximately $7.2 million, which has resulted in its stock rising 389%.
Like MicroStrategy, the largest corporate Bitcoin shareholder, Metaplanet announced its intention to use a variety of capital market instruments to strategically boost its Bitcoin reserves. The firm's crypto investment strategy aims to hedge against Japan's increasing debt burden and the rapidly depreciating Japanese yen.
Currently, Metaplanet shares are only traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, making them inaccessible to US investors. However, Arnold Naskar, a founder of the security token platform STOKR, recently expressed the intention to tokenize Metaplanet shares on the Bitcoin layer-2 network, Liquid, in a similar way it had tokenized MicroStrategy stock.