On Thursday (April 7), Michael J. Saylor, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Nasdaq-listed business intelligence company MicroStrategy Inc. (NASDAQ: MSTR), explained why he is more bullish than ever on Bitcoin.
His comments were made while speaking with Catherine Wood — Founder, CIO, and CEO at ARK Investment Management, LLC — in Miami, Florida on day two of the four-day Bitcoin 2022 conference.
It is worth remembering that on 11 August 2020, MicroStrategy announced via a press release that it had “purchased 21,454 bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $250 million” to use as a “primary treasury reserve asset.”
Saylor said at the time:
“Our decision to invest in Bitcoin at this time was driven in part by a confluence of macro factors affecting the economic and business landscape that we believe is creating long-term risks for our corporate treasury program ― risks that should be addressed proactively.“
Since then MicroStrategy has continued to accumulate Bitcoin and its CEO has become one of Bitcoin’s most vocal advocates. MicroStrategy’s latest $BTC purchase, which Saylor tweeted about on April 5, means that the firm is now HODLing around 129,218 bitcoins, which were “acquired for ~$3.97 billion at an average price of ~$30,700 per bitcoin.”
As for the Ark Invest CEO, according to a report by Insider, on February 1, Wood was present at an event/talk hosted by Public (a competitor to Robinhood that allows users to invest in stocks, funds, and crypto), which allowed retail investors and traders to ask her questions.
When Wood was asked which of these top two cryptoassets she is more bullish on, Wood replied that it is not really possible to compare the two and went on to say:
“We maintain high conviction in both.”
With regard to Bitcoin, she called it “the most profound application of public blockchains, the foundation of ‘self-sovereign’ digital money.” As for Ethereum, she said that it “emerged in 2021 as the predominant smart contracting platform.”
And on 25 February 2021, Wood talked about Bitcoin while speaking as part of a panel for the Bloomberg Crypto Summit.
With regard to Bitcoin’s market cap potential, this is what she had to say:
“We are so early. That $950 billion dollar market cap gives you a sense of network value, gives you a sense of how early we are. And the various use cases that we have written about… as institutions move in, where an appropriate asset allocation will be given risk and return parameters, various ones, and we also have dimensions, the use cases, the insurance policy that this represents against not only unhinged monetary policy but outright confiscation of wealth in other countries, demonetisation, trade settlement…
“When you aggregate all of these use cases for Bitcoin and assume a conservative allocation, let’s say that in the terms of cash or insurance policies, you do get into the trillions of dollars of market cap potential out there.“
Anyway, going back to Saylor’s chat with Wood, the MicroStrategy CEO started with talking about the Executive Order on “Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets”, which was signed by President Biden on March 9:
“I think the last 12 months has been just a 180-degree turn. If you roll back 12 months, you had so many smart people that had a lot of money and power saying ‘Bitcoin looks too good to be true, it’s so good [that] someone’s going to ban it’… and I think a couple of weeks ago with the executive order, what we had was the President of the United States giving a green light to Bitcoin…
“You have a one-page memo, and it says whereas 40 million Americans rely upon this and this is part of their future, I hereby direct every government agency to get educated on Bitcoin and figure out how you incorporate into the government. And I think that if I scan the last hundred years of history and I ask when’s the last time the president of the United States directed the government to embrace a new asset class, the answer is never…
“So I think that Bitcoin should be taking a victory lap for what happened here… because a year ago Bitcoin was maybe it was eastern Technology and it wasn’t western technology and maybe the government was going to ban it and were afraid of it. And what happened the last 12 months is Bitcoin moved west. Bitcoin has been embraced, The administration has given a green light to Bitcoin, and Congress and the Senate are enthusiastically figuring out Bitcoin. And now, there’s a little jockeying about who can be the most pro-Bitcoin politician.“
Next, Wood and Saylor talked abut the regulatory climate.
Wood said that she was happy that in the U.S. she was not hearing too many people say that Bitcoin will one day “displace the dollar as the reserve currency of the world,” but she did mention that some U.S. politicians might raise this as a top concern.
Saylor said:
“The momentum is clearly behind Bitcoin. A lot of people have anxiety about regulation, and they ask me ‘aren’t you afraid?’. And I do not have anxiety about regulation. When I look at this, I say ‘yeah, there’s a lot of stuff to be worked through, FASB is working through some accounting issues, FDIC is working through some banking issues, SEC is working through some security issues, the administration is working through all their issues.’
“But regardless of how fast that happens and how sharp that occurs, I don’t think there’s any outcome other than favorable for Bitcoin. And I think that what I say over and over again is Bitcoin is the ethical safe haven for any public figure, and it is the technical safe haven for any technical company, and it is the financial safe haven for any investors.“
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
