Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan says that corporate buying of Bitcoin (BTC) is most likely about to explode.
In a new interview with Kyle Chasse on his YouTube channel, Hougan notes that while holding BTC in corporate treasuries is still relatively unorthodox, the same could be said about Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in their early days.
Hougan says he sees a theme developing in the adoption of Bitcoin as a corporate reserve asset that parallels the embrace of BTC ETFs.
“Let me make an analogy to the ETF space… If you look at institutional asset managers in the crypto space, in the early days, it was only crypto native people. It was Grayscale, it was Bitwise, and there were a few others. And then you had financial institutions run not as public companies but as family-run businesses. Fidelity is run by a family, one person can make a decision – ‘I’m going into Bitcoin’ – and they did. VanEck is run by Jan Van Eck. He loved Bitcoin and they went into the space. But fast forward to today and its BlackRock and it’s Invesco, and it’s the largest institutions in the world coming into the space.
You’re seeing the same thing in companies. It was Michael Saylor alone. Then it’s Michael Saylor and Metaplanet and a few others. Oh, well, Block has some Bitcoin, and Tesla may be reconsidering it, and PayPal is probably going to look at it and it’s expanding out. Why do we not think that BlackRock – the BlackRock equivalent – will come in and own Bitcoin, which is a Mag 7 company putting it on its balance sheet at five or ten percent of their massive cash pile? To me, it pattern matches exactly. People were skeptical then, and look at us today. People are skeptical now, and I think we’ll be in the same place in a few years.”
At time of writing, Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy has the largest corporate treasury of BTC, followed by mining firms Marathon and Riot Platforms. Tesla holds the fifth-largest corporate stack of Bitcoin.
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