GameStop submitted a non-binding $55.5 billion offer for eBay, valuing the marketplace at $125 a share in a roughly even split of cash and stock. The funding mix — $9.4 billion of cash plus up to $20 billion of TD Securities-backed financing — leaves the company's 4,710 bitcoin treasury, worth around $368 million, on the table as a possible source of capital.
GameStop submitted a non-binding offer to acquire eBay for $55.5 billion on May 4, valuing the online marketplace at $125 a share in a roughly even split of cash and GameStop stock. The video-game retailer said it would fund the deal from $9.4 billion of "cash and liquid investments" already on its balance sheet plus up to $20 billion of new financing, backed by a letter from TD Securities. The proposal also revives a question CEO Ryan Cohen left open in February when he first teased a "very big" consumer acquisition and called it "way more compelling than bitcoin": whether GameStop's 4,710-coin treasury, currently worth around $368 million, will be sold to fund the deal.
The disclosure ends, at least in tone, the bitcoin-treasury experiment Cohen launched in May 2025. GameStop spent roughly $500 million accumulating coins through last year on the explicit pitch that the company would behave like Strategy with a games retailer attached — keep the cash flow, stack the coins, let the asymmetry compound. It made sense as long as nothing better came along. Now something has, or at least something Cohen wants Wall Street to think is better, and the treasury position is suddenly negotiable.
Investors took the bid badly. GameStop shares fell more than 9 per cent on the day of the offer, with Morgan Stanley flagging the "fundamentally different" business models of the two companies. eBay runs a marketplace platform with around 135 million active buyers across 190 markets and a 35 per cent gross-merchandise-value-to-revenue conversion that GameStop has never come close to in its physical retail business. Selling pre-owned video games is not a logical adjacency to running an open auction marketplace; the cross-sell case in the proposal letter does most of the heavy lifting, and most analysts are unconvinced it can carry the weight.
The bitcoin angle is what makes the bid legible to crypto markets. If GameStop sells its 4,710 coins to help close the deal, that is one of the larger discretionary sales by a US treasury holder this cycle — and it lands at a moment when bitcoin is consolidating after briefly clearing $80,000 and then falling back on the missile report near Jask. Strategy, which now holds 818,334 coins after another $254 million purchase last week, has been the obvious counter-example: a treasury company that did not flinch at any price point and has no operating distraction to pull capital toward.
Cohen's framing is telling. He did not say the bitcoin position had failed, nor that it was wrong to acquire. He said something different — that the eBay deal was "way more compelling," language that treats the treasury as a source of capital rather than a strategic asset. That is the distinction every corporate bitcoin holder eventually faces. Treasuries kept long enough to be called strategic become collateral the moment a deal lands. The interesting question is not whether Cohen will sell. It is whether the next CEO at the next bitcoin-on-balance-sheet company will, when their own M&A moment arrives.
The bid itself faces structural obstacles before any of the bitcoin matters. eBay's board has not endorsed the offer, the price is roughly 55 per cent above eBay's 30-day VWAP, and a cash-and-stock structure pulled together from $20 billion of new financing would leave the combined entity with leverage well above what shareholders of either company have historically tolerated. Activist investors who pushed for a clean GameStop turnaround over the past two years are unlikely to welcome a $55 billion adjacency play. The TD Securities letter is a financing commitment, not a closed deal.
If the offer does close, the combined entity would inherit something else of interest to crypto markets. eBay shut down its in-house Web3 division in 2025 — the company exited the NFT marketplace business and laid off the Manchester team that built it — but the underlying payments rail, and the 135 million-buyer marketplace it sits beneath, is still there. A combined GameStop-eBay holding the residual bitcoin position alongside that distribution would, on paper, have one of the more interesting payment surfaces in retail. Whether Cohen has the operational appetite to run it that way after spending the proceeds of the BTC sale is a different question.
For now the bitcoin-treasury thesis at GameStop is exactly as durable as the cheaper deal in front of it. The position survived the 2025 drawdown intact. It might not survive Q3 2026.
