Among other things, 2025 will certainly be remembered for the mania and then breathtaking collapse of hastily formed bitcoin tax companies trying to mirror the success of Michael Saylor’s strategy. Perhaps none is more high profile than KindlyMD ( NAKA ), led by David Bailey, formerly the highly successful CEO of Bitcoin Magazine and Bitcoin Whisperer for Donald Trump’s victorious presidential campaign.
This feature is part of CoinDesk’s The list of most influential 2025.
Then in May, a little-known microcap healthcare company, KindlyMD, announced a merger deal with Bailey’s Nakamoto Holdings, backed by more than $700 million in funding, to launch a bitcoin tax company. Shares of Kindly (then ticker KIND, but soon changed to NAKA) rose from about $2 to more than $30 within days. It was the top.
Despite Bailey’s campaign of almost non-stop bull posting on X, NAKA shares fell through 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 early investors were able to sell their shares about a month later, they sold it. Bailey, in one of the more curious moves ever for a public company CEO, even encouraged it. “For those shareholders who have come looking for a deal, I urge you to leave,” he wrote in a September letter. Exit they did.
Trading at about $0.45 this week, KindlyMD shares are down about 99% from their highs and worth about 25% of what they fetched before the merger deal with Bailey’s Nakamoto Holdings.
