MicroStrategy Revisited

When MicroStrategy put $250 million into Bitcoin in August 2020, the financial press was baffled. A struggling software company betting its entire treasury on a volatile cryptocurrency. Analysts warned shareholders. Saylor got called reckless on television.

Four years later, the numbers look different.

MicroStrategy kept buying — through the 2021 bull run, through the FTX collapse and the 2022 crash, and aggressively again in 2024. By 2025, the company holds over 400,000 Bitcoin — more than 2% of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist.

The company has become something unusual in public markets: essentially a leveraged Bitcoin holding company that also runs a software business. Its stock has become a way for institutional investors who can’t hold Bitcoin directly to get exposure. When Bitcoin rises, MicroStrategy shares rise more. When Bitcoin falls, they fall harder.

It has costs. The volatility is real. The leverage is real. In deep bear markets, MicroStrategy shareholders feel significant pain.

But the core thesis Saylor put forward in 2020 — that holding cash in a world of persistent monetary debasement is a guaranteed slow loss, and Bitcoin is a better treasury reserve asset — hasn’t been disproven. By most measures it’s been vindicated.

More importantly, MicroStrategy proved that a publicly listed company could adopt a Bitcoin treasury strategy and survive it. That proof opened the door for every CFO and corporate treasurer who came after.

You can’t open a door you haven’t demonstrated can be opened.

Tomorrow: Bitcoin ETFs one year on — what the data shows.

— The Daily Bit