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Corporate Bitcoin buying is also picking up again. Strategy leading the charge. Michael Saylor's company just added another $21 million of Bitcoin, extending a renewed buying streak as prices recover and more companies move crypto back onto their balance sheets. Strategy, check this out, now holds roughly $70 billion in Bitcoin. And Tim, that's about 4% of total supply.
Well, let's get to more on Strategy. Joining us from DC Fintech Week at the World Bank for an exclusive interview is Michael Saylor, founder and executive chairman of Strategy. It's the world's largest publicly traded Bitcoin accumulator. Michael, always good to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. Bitcoin had a great summer, still though about 30% below last year's all-time highs. What is your view on where Bitcoin goes from here?
Well, we think we're at the beginning of a bull market. We normally look at where Bitcoin is versus 200-day moving average and we bounced slightly below it. Now we're moving up 25% premium. So the headwinds were restrictive trade policy, restrictive foreign policy, restrictive currency or monetary policy. And now we're rotating into some tailwinds. We've got a very favorable regulatory environment. We've got banking adoption accelerating. We've got tokenized securities and the digital asset space accelerating. We've got the formation of and the strengthening of digital credit networks and of course banking credit coming online and all these things are very auspicious for the asset.
Having said that, I feel like Michael, everyone is competing for capital against AI. So much money flowing into it. We see it just kind of squeezing out investments elsewhere. How long do you think that continues and what kind of an impact are you guys feeling in the crypto space as a result?
Well, you can see that AI is going to demonetize a lot of equities that are based upon labor and talent. And so there's a lot of risk in the AI trade, especially across equities, either equities that are attempting to create the next magic product and they might miss or equities that are based upon tens of thousands of humans and they're getting demonetized and degraded. On the other hand, there's going to be a rotation into scarce desirable capital, whether that's Palm Beach real estate or gold or digital gold in the form of Bitcoin or some trophy asset. Capital investors are going to look for things that the robots can't make more of and certainly the king of commodities right now is Bitcoin because it's digital capital.
So why haven't we seen that yet? Because the narrative that you're explaining right now, we've seen it hit, let's say, you know, with the SaaS apocalypse and we've seen concerns about software companies, Michael, when it comes to the AI trade. If the thesis that you espouse comes true and that people will look for stuff with scarcity, why hasn't it materialized with Bitcoin yet?
Well, if we look at the Bitcoin standard era, which started when we bought our first Bitcoin in August of 2020, Bitcoin is up approximately 38% a year every year. MSTR, the digital equity that our company represents is up 52 or 53% every year. The only stock you know of that's outperforming that is Nvidia. Every other Mag 7 stock and all the other major S&P stocks are underperforming that. Bitcoin is outperforming gold. Gold is outperforming the S&P index. And ultimately if you look at the entire complex, digital capital is the strongest performing capital and digital credit like STRC is paying double to triple other conventional credit instruments and the digital equities like MSTR or Strive, AST, they're outperforming most, you know, 98% of the other publicly traded stocks.
So I am curious though, Michael, you know the debate that's been out there that crypto overall, Bitcoin, it's a safe haven or it's a growth asset. So how should investors be clarifying it or considering it?
Bitcoin is a block of digital capital and so it's about a 40 vol, 40 ARR asset. You can carve that block of capital and step it down into digital credit. So you can create something with a volatility less than 10 that pays a 10% dividend as a return of capital or you can amplify it and step it up and you can create an equity like MSTR which is an 80 vol asset and when you feed the high volatility equities in the derivatives market you get extremely valuable options. So think of Bitcoin as just raw financial energy. Look, there's more volatility in gold. Gold was showing a V of 25 whereas the S&P is 10 to 15. And so if you're a V trader, if you're a derivative trader, you want to feed high volatility into the derivatives. If you're an equity investor, you want either amplified Bitcoin or Bitcoin. If Bitcoin is up 40%, how do I get 50 or 60%? And the way you do that is you amplify the equity by using credit in order to drive increase in Bitcoin per share. So there's something for every type of investor here depending upon whether you're a short duration credit investor, a long duration credit investor, a long duration capital investor, or you're an equity investor. I think that most of the market's fixated on AI. They understand digital intelligence, but what I'd say there is those investments are expensive and risky and complicated. Most of the market doesn't understand digital capital, digital credit, and digital equity. Those investments aren't that risky and they're actually not that complicated. They're just contrarian and people don't think this way. And so they have a hard time getting their heads around these new ideas.
Hey, so okay, Michael, new ideas. I get it. So if there's something there for everything, why did you guys actually sell some Bitcoin back in June? It was just a handful. Bitcoin was trading at around $73,000. It kind of broke with your longstanding idea of recommendations to never part with Bitcoin. So, it was a tiny amount, but do you regret doing that? And why sell in the first place if you think that it kind of makes sense in multiple environments?
The way to think of our company is we're a structured finance company. So, on any given day, we might buy Bitcoin or sell Bitcoin. We might buy dollars or sell dollars. We might buy equity or sell equity. We could sell MSTR or buy it back. We might buy credit STRC. We might sell it. To the extent that we can swap equity for capital, capital for cash, cash for our securities or back for credit, then we can arbitrage any opportunity in the equity, credit or capital market to the benefit of our shareholders. If we were to take the position that we will never sell the equity or we will never sell the capital or we will never sell the credit, we actually degrade the value of the company. So, it's important for us to be able to trade any asset pair in any direction any time. And what we established this summer is the ability for the company to buy and sell the credit, buy and sell the equity, and buy and sell the Bitcoin. And that was a big unlock for all of our investors and every asset class.
Well, it was, you might call it an unlock, but it spooked the crypto market and specifically spooked Bitcoin and you saw Bitcoin move lower as a result of that because they saw Michael Saylor of Strategy sell something that he said people should hold on to forever. Was that a mistake?
We were inoculating the market and the first move of 32 Bitcoin people overreacted to, but then later on we were able to sell thousands of Bitcoin without the market reacting to it at all. In fact later on we sold thousands of Bitcoin and the market traded up. So the important thing is that when you do something for the first time, sometimes you get a cramp, but you have to condition all of your investors and the market in general that you're going to buy and sell depending upon what's in the best interest of the shareholders if you're going to run the company and do the right thing for Bitcoin and the right thing for the credit investors and the right thing for the equity investors. It's just growing pains and we're growing up.
So then are you conditioning the market and investors for selling more Bitcoin in the next few months?
As a general rule, we're an acquirer. So we have acquired quite a bit of Bitcoin. I think we've acquired more Bitcoin than any company in the world this year. And you should expect that we will increase our Bitcoin holdings over time. We're moving into a bull market. So I would expect we'll probably be acquiring Bitcoin and we will be issuing credit.
Okay. Into the bull market.
In a bear market, you would actually use dollars to pay the credit dividend or you might raise dollars with Bitcoin. But it depends upon the market cycle.
You've said twice during this conversation that we're in a bull market when it comes to Bitcoin right now. How high in this cycle do you see it going?
Yeah, I think that it should definitely move back into the six figures, back beyond $100,000. And our long-term forecast is Bitcoin grows 20 to 30% a year over the next 20 years. So, clearly the last 12 months have been a contraction. I think we hit the bottom around slightly below 60,000. I think we bounced off it. Now we're moving up into the 80s. I think we'll continue to march forward from here.
100,000 by when, Michael?
