Crypto Treasury Firms Swarm Wall Street in SPAC, Merger Boom

A multibillion-dollar capital markets experiment is unfolding on Wall Street, as entrepreneurs use blank-check companies and reverse mergers to take their holdings of digital assets public.

Firms from SoftBank Group Corp.-backed Twenty One Capital and Justin Sun’s Tron Inc. to influencer Anthony Pompliano’s ProCap Financial Inc. are raising equity and convertible debt to buy crypto — injecting the assets into vehicles that already trade on a stock exchange, with varying degrees of financial engineering.

The wager: that markets will keep rewarding leveraged access to volatile tokens. That’s even as short sellers like Jim Chanos warn the model ...