Kraken’s Bitcoin Strategist: More Than 50% of S&P 500 Companies Will Buy Bitcoin

Pierre Rochard, Bitcoin Strategist at crypto exchange Kraken, recently explained why he expects more than half of the companies making up the S&P 500 to have Bitcoin in their balance sheet by the end of 2021.

Rochard, who is also the co-host of “Noded Bitcoin Podcast“, as well as Co-Founder of Satoshi Nakamato Institute, made his comments about Bitcoin during Kraken’s 2021 Crypto Market Outlook Webinar (which was on December 17).

According to a report by The Daily HODL, Rochard made the following bold prediction during this webinar:

“My boldest prediction is that if we take the S&P 500, the world’s largest corporations, I think that by the end of 2021, more than half of them will have Bitcoin on their balance sheet, and I think that will be driven by simple economics, which is that issuing shares to buy Bitcoin causes your stock price to go up more than the dilution.

“And so because that is the case – we have market data showing this – we’re going to see a huge amount of corporate adoption of Bitcoin, and we’ll even see like what [MicroStrategy CEO] Michael Saylor is doing, corporations issuing large quantities of bonds, fixed-income instruments – whether they’re convertible or whatever – in order to just bulk buy Bitcoin.”

In an interview with Real Vision (which was released on December 17), Rochard went even further, saying that he believes that as more and more companies follow MicroStrategy’s lead and start using Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset, they could eventually insist on getting paid in Bitcoin:

“And so I think that as more and more companies join the Bitcoin standard and start using Bitcoin as their treasury reserve asset, then they will want to get paid in Bitcoin so that they avoid the transaction costs of having to convert USD into Bitcoin. And so really, this is why people say we have to have store of value adoption before we have medium of exchange adoption.”

Yesterday, Nasdaq-listed business intelligence software company MicroStrategy Inc. (NASDAQ: MSTR) revealed that it had invested another $650 million in Bitcoin.