On Thursday (October 27), Michael Saylor, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of business intelligence software company MicroStrategy Inc. (NASDAQ: MSTR), talked about how his company’s stock has performed compared to big tech stocks since the firm adopted the Bitcoin standard.
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 former CEO has become one of Bitcoin’s most vocal advocates. MicroStrategy’s latest $BTC purchase, which Saylor tweeted about on 20 September 2022, means that the firm is now HODLing around 130,000 bitcoins, which were “acquired for ~$3.98 billion at an average price of ~$30,639 per bitcoin.”
Anyway, yesterday (October 27), Saylor took to Twitter to point out that since MicroStrategy started putting Bitcoin on its balance sheet on 11 August 2020, the price of MicroStrategy stock, i.e. MSTR, has gone up 121%, which is pretty impressive when you consider that the best performing big tech stock, i.e. AAPL has only gone up by 30% and the worst-performing big tech stock, i.e. META, is down 62% since that date.
On 4 September 2022, CoinDesk reported that Saylor had spoken (via a video call) on Saturday (September 3) to an audience at the Baltic Honeybadger conference in Riga, Latvia, and that he had this to say about what his firm is doing with the Lightning Network:
“MicroStrategy has got some R&D projects going on right now where we’re working on enterprise applications of Lightning: enterprise Lightning wallet, enterprise Lightning servers, enterprise authentication.“
He also explained why he believes that Lightning has a great future:
“The advantage of Lightning is not just that you could scale up bitcoin for billions of people, or drive the transaction cost to nearly nothing, but also, the ethos of bitcoin is to go very carefully and not move fast on the base layer without the universal consensus, but in Lightning, you can move much more aggressively developing functionality and take more risks with the applications than you can with the underlying bitcoin layer.“
Late last month, MicroStrategy started looking for a Lighning software engineer to help them “build a Lightning Network-based SaaS platform, providing enterprises with innovative solutions to cyber-security challenges and enabling new eCommerce use-cases.”
