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While dozens of public companies currently hold bitcoin on their balance sheets, a world where thousands — yes, thousands — more follow suit is inevitable. At least according to panelists at Bitwise’s Bitcoin Standard Corporations Investor Day.
“To everyone wearing an orange tie…It’s good to be on the team with you,” Strategy founder Michael Saylor told the Thursday event crowd.
He then wanted the Pier 59 window shades lowered to prevent light from obfuscating his PowerPoint presentation. As if the bitcoin Gods heard him, they started coming down a moment later.
It was Saylor’s typical spiel, one you might have heard before: Most asset classes don’t beat monetary inflation. Bitcoin allows an Uber driver in Nigeria to outperform the smartest money managers in NYC. It’s a better version of gold that he expects to hit $13 million a coin by 2045. Yada yada yada.
Strategy owns 538,200 BTC. (Here’s, in a nutshell, how they plan to keep buying.)
“I don’t say this to brag, because the truth is the way we did it was so brainless,” Saylor said. “Everything that all these companies do is extremely complicated — we could not create NVIDIA chips or create iPhones. Every one of you could copy me.”
But will they?
Bitwise, in a Q1 report, put the number of public companies holding BTC at 79.
Kraken CFO Stephanie Lemmerman made perhaps the most interesting prediction. She expects about 20% of the roughly 55,000 public companies to hold BTC a couple years from now.
That’s a lot of companies. Like 11,000.
A key piece of the nebulous “broader adoption” narrative you hear plenty about, companies jumping in can move prices while offering additional endorsements.
Semler Scientific Chair Eric Semler noted how the medical tech provider — sitting on plenty of cash — was facing challenges within its core business. The company first bought BTC last year and now owns 3,303 BTC.
While it took the old SEC months to approve Semler’s first at-the-market (ATM) offering to help it buy more bitcoin, Semler said, the new-look agency quickly greenlit its latest one.
There are possibly “thousands” of what the executive called “zombie” companies in a similar situation that would benefit from a BTC treasury strategy, he added.
Then there are those looking to go bigger. Twenty One Capital — a new entity backed by Tether and Softbank that is combining with Cantor Equity Partners — looks to launch with roughly 42,000 BTC. That would be behind only Strategy and bitcoin miner Marathon Digital.
“There’re a lot of smaller-scale…bitcoin treasury companies, which have a role to play,” Cantor Fitzgerald’s Robert Harrington said. “But I think this market demands scale.”
Once one of the Magnificent 7 companies starts buying BTC, many more will follow, panelists noted throughout the day. You might remember Microsoft shareholders rejected a related proposal in December.
We know, of course, that bitcoin is volatile. An audience member asked what happens if BTC’s price falls below the price at which a company acquired it.
Establishing “board alignment” that this is a long-term play is crucial, said Fold General Counsel Hailey Lennon. She added: “Unless the fundamentals of bitcoin change, the goal is not to sell.”
Lemmerman noted too: “It’s not necessarily where you came in but where you expect [BTC] to be and what you’re forecasting.”
Fundstrat Capital CIO Tom Lee argued, too, that there’s “a lot more to the [bitcoin] treasury story” than buying a speculative asset that can appreciate. It’s a new accounting standard of sorts — “the idea that you don’t have to have cash holdings only in the US dollar.”
