First Bitcoin. Then GameStop. Now Tiny Tungsten Cubes.

They bought the bitcoin dip. They took GameStop to the moon. Now the online investor army has a new favourite thing to buy and hold: small tungsten cubes.

Even in a year that has featured dog-meme cryptocurrencies and rappers shilling SPACs, tungsten cubes stand out. They are as inert as they sound: gray, an inch or two on each side and 1.7 times as dense as lead. A major selling point, according to Amazon.com’s product page, is that they are “extremely heavy for their size.”

That also is their main source of appeal to crypto bros and other enthusiasts who caused a run on supplies at a major tungsten provider in recent weeks. They are shelling out around $400 apiece for 2-inch cubes weighing around 5 pounds, or $3,000 for the 4-inch version as heavy as a low-horsepower outboard motor—and almost three times the price.

While cube enthusiasts overlap with aficionados of ephemeral varieties of digital money prone to heart-stopping swings in value, their new paperweights, given their density, are among the most-tangible things on earth. Tungsten has one of the highest tensile strengths and melting points among metals.

Drew Morris, a 35-year-old Florida lawyer at a blockchain intelligence company, bought his 1½-inch cube after friends came across it on Twitter and in Telegram group chats. He found the density mind-blowing.

“I keep it on my desk as a reminder of what motivates me—keep going, keep working,” said Mr. Morris, who also invests in cryptocurrencies. “One day, I’ll be able to upgrade to a larger-size cube.”

Cubists like Mr. Morris got recent inspiration from a niche corner of online life: financial Twitter. Fintwit, as it is called, typically consists of investors small and large debating the direction of markets, the prospects for inflation and recipes for grilled meats. Lately, photos of smoked brisket have given away to pictures of cubes.

Nic Carter, founding partner at the blockchain-focused venture-capital firm Castle Island Ventures, describes himself in his twitter bio as the “original tungpiller.” He said the physical heft of the cubes contrasts with the intangible nature of cryptomarkets.

“We’re just deprived of physical totems of our affection, and so tungsten fills that hole in our hearts,” he said.

Demand intensified after Neeraj K. Agrawal, director of communications at Coin Center, a nonprofit cryptocurrency research and advocacy group, posted a joke mock-up of a faked Bloomberg News story claiming crypto traders were behind an imaginary global tungsten shortage.

“I’m gonna be buried with my cube probably,” said Mr. Agrawal. “It will be like a pharaoh buried with his possessions, so the cube will have a place of honor.”

Cube enthusiasts often describe them in quasimystical terms. “You kind of start wondering about gravity and the forces of nature, and it can send you on an out-there-wandering experience,” said Rabbi Michael Caras, an Albany-based Jewish day-school teacher, who uses the twitter handle @thebitcoinrabbi. He owns a 1½-inch cube.

“It’s kind of like a disconnect between what your eyes are seeing and what you’re feeling and what you expect from something that fits in the palm of your hand,” he said.

There is a rallying cry: “We like the cube.” That’s a play on the phrase “We like the stock,” often used on sites such as Reddit’s WallStreetBets to show support for buying shares of GameStop Corp., AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. or other meme stocks.

The hype sparked a surge in demand at Midwest Tungsten Service Inc., which sells the cubes, along with tungsten in various industrial forms for use in things such as wiring and cutting tools. Midwest Tungsten General Manager Kevin Anetsberger said the $6 billion to $9 billion global tungsten market can support the burgeoning demand for cubes, though the company did need to replenish inventories.

“The universal response whenever we’ve had anybody in our facility, and we’ve handed them tungsten to hold, it’s kind of astonishment,” said Mr. Anetsberger, a 36-year veteran of the company.

While Mr. Anetsberger won’t comment on how much Midwest Tungsten has made from the recent sales, it last week began accepting payments in bitcoin. The first order arrived eight minutes later.

An anonymous group of crypto advocates recently minted 500 digital cubes as nonfungible tokens—unique digital identifiers that have powered this year’s boom in sales of digital collectibles and art, such as NBA Top Shot and the American artist Beeple’s $69 million “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days.” The tungsten NFTs, already sold out, entitle holders to a single real cube of equivalent size. Proceeds go to crypto advocacy groups, including Mr. Agrawal’s Coin Center.

Midwest Tungsten recently launched an NFT of a 14-inch cube weighing almost 1,800 pounds. Buy an NFT and you can visit the cube once a year. On social media, the company requested photos of the cubes in their new homes. “Is it an only-cube?” the firm tweeted.

Daniel Matuszewski, co-founder of cryptocurrency investment firm CMS Holdings, asked Midwest Tungsten to make a 7-inch cube engraved with the company’s name in comic sans. Mr. Matuszewski said the roughly 230-pound cube should arrive sometime around the winter holidays. All in, the company has spent more than $50,000 on branded cubes, he said.

“We have a pretty interesting fight going on internally, whether or not somebody is actually going to be able to pick that up,” Mr. Matuszewski said.

Midwest Tungsten also sells tungsten spheres.

Mr. Morris, the Florida lawyer, isn’t much interested. “We like the cube,” he said.

As the war against Hamas dragged into 2024, there were worries here that investment would dry up in Israel’s globally important technology sector, as much of the world became angry against the casualties in Gaza and recoiled at the unstable security situation.

In fact, a new survey found investment into Israeli technology startups grew 28% last year to $10.6 billion. The influx buoyed Israel’s economy and helped it maintain a war footing on several battlefronts.

The increase marks a turnaround for Israeli startups, which had experienced a decline in investments in 2023 to $8.3 billion, a drop blamed in part on an effort to overhaul the country’s judicial system and the initial shock of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack.

Tech investment in Israel remains depressed from years past. It is still just a third of the almost $30 billion in private investments raised in 2021, a peak after which Israel followed the U.S. into a funding market downturn.

Any increase in Israeli technology investment defied expectations though. The sector is responsible for 20% of Israel’s gross domestic product and about 10% of employment. It contributed directly to 2.2% of GDP growth in the first three quarters of the year, according to Startup Nation Central—without which Israel would have been on a negative growth trend, it said.

“If you asked me a year before if I expected those numbers, I wouldn’t have,” said Avi Hasson, head of Startup Nation Central, the Tel Aviv-based nonprofit that tracks tech investments and released the investment survey.

Israel’s tech sector is among the world’s largest technology hubs, especially for startups. It has remained one of the most stable parts of the Israeli economy during the 15-month long war, which has taxed the economy and slashed expectations for growth to a mere 0.5% in 2024.

Industry investors and analysts say the war stifled what could have been even stronger growth. The survey didn’t break out how much of 2024’s investment came from foreign sources and local funders.

“We have an extremely innovative and dynamic high tech sector which is still holding on,” said Karnit Flug, a former governor of the Bank of Israel and now a senior fellow at the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute, a think tank. “It has recovered somewhat since the start of the war, but not as much as one would hope.”

At the war’s outset, tens of thousands of Israel’s nearly 400,000 tech employees were called into reserve service and companies scrambled to realign operations as rockets from Gaza and Lebanon pounded the country. Even as operations normalized, foreign airlines overwhelmingly cut service to Israel, spooking investors and making it harder for Israelis to reach their customers abroad.

An explosion in negative global sentiment toward Israel introduced a new form of risk in doing business with Israeli companies. Global ratings firms lowered Israel’s credit rating over uncertainty caused by the war.

Israel’s government flooded money into the economy to stabilize it shortly after war broke out in October 2023. That expansionary fiscal policy, economists say, stemmed what was an initial economic contraction in the war’s first quarter and helped Israel regain its footing, but is now resulting in expected tax increases to foot the bill.

The 2024 boost was led by investments into Israeli cybersecurity companies, which captured about 40% of all private capital raised, despite representing only 7% of Israeli tech companies. Many of Israel’s tech workers have served in advanced military-technology units, where they can gain experience building products. Israeli tech products are sometimes tested on the battlefield. These factors have led to its cybersecurity companies being dominant in the global market, industry experts said.

The number of Israeli defense-tech companies active throughout 2024 doubled, although they contributed to a much smaller percentage of the overall growth in investments. This included some startups which pivoted to the area amid a surge in global demand spurred by the war in Ukraine and at home in Israel. Funding raised by Israeli defense-tech companies grew to $165 million in 2024, from $19 million the previous year.

“The fact that things are literally battlefield proven, and both the understanding of the customer as well as the ability to put it into use and to accelerate the progress of those technologies, is something that is unique to Israel,” said Hasson.

First Bitcoin. Then GameStop. Now Tiny Tungsten Cubes.

Online investors crave the tangible pleasure of holding surprisingly heavy metal blocks.

The 28% increase buoyed the country as it battled on several fronts but investment remains down from 2021