The Bitcoin Beacon
Stack BTC has agreed a £12M reverse takeover of Direct Bullion — turning an old-money cash machine into a pump for new-money accumulation.
LONDON — Stack BTC, the London-listed bitcoin treasury company backed by Nigel Farage, has agreed to buy a gold dealer. On Monday it proposed acquiring Direct Bullion, a privately held precious-metals seller, for up to £12 million — about $16 million — in a deal it says will fund future bitcoin purchases with the dealer’s own cash flow.
The plan inverts a century of financial instinct. Here a bitcoin buyer is acquiring a gold merchant, not the other way round, and treating the older asset’s business as a feeder for the newer one.
The offer is non-binding and comes in three parts: £3 million in cash, roughly £4 million in shares at completion, and £5 million in performance-linked cash paid out later. The new shares would be issued at a floor of 6 pence and locked up for four years.
Direct Bullion is not a shell. It reported £52.1 million in revenue and £2.15 million in profit after tax for the year ended January 2026. That profit is the point: Stack wants a business that throws off cash every quarter, so it can keep stacking bitcoin without returning to shareholders for more money each time.
Most treasury companies fund their buying by selling shares. Stack is trying to fund it by selling gold.
The dominant treasury-company model raises money by issuing stock while the shares trade above the value of the bitcoin they hold, then spends the proceeds on more coins. It works while the premium holds and stalls when it doesn’t. Every raise also dilutes existing holders.
An operating business changes the math. If Direct Bullion keeps earning, Stack can buy bitcoin out of profits rather than out of new shares — a slower drip, but one that doesn’t depend on the market paying a premium for the privilege. Stack calls this its first purchase under a strategy of acquiring profitable companies to finance accumulation.
The deal is a related-party transaction. Paul Withers, a Stack director, controls the entity selling Direct Bullion, which means the buyer and one of the sellers share a boardroom. It also qualifies as a reverse takeover under UK listing rules, so it still needs due diligence, definitive agreements and shareholder approval before anything closes.
The 6-pence share floor and four-year lock-in are designed to signal that insiders are staying put. They also concentrate the outcome on execution: buy a real business at the wrong price, or run it badly, and the bitcoin thesis gets dragged down by a gold ledger.
Gold and bitcoin have spent a decade cast as rivals for the same job — the asset you hold when you distrust the currency. Stack’s wager is that they need not compete on a balance sheet. One can quietly bankroll the other.
Whether it works depends on numbers no press release settles: what Stack pays for the cash flow, whether bullion demand holds, and whether a treasury company can run an operating business at all. But the direction is unmistakable. The maturing bitcoin-treasury trade is looking past capital markets and toward businesses that simply make money.
Why it matters: funding bitcoin buys from a real company’s profits is more durable than serial share sales — and it reintroduces the operating risk that pure bitcoin exposure was meant to avoid.
Deal terms (£3M cash, ~£4M shares, £5M performance-linked; 6p share floor; four-year lock-in), Direct Bullion’s £52.1M revenue and £2.15M after-tax profit, and the related-party/reverse-takeover status are per CoinDesk, Cryptopolitan and BusinessCloud, reporting Sept 15, 2026. The deal is non-binding and subject to due diligence and shareholder approval. Informational only — not financial advice.
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