Michael Saylor - Bitcoin 2026 Outlook: The Death of the 4-Year Cycle & Rise of Digital Credit

Bullish. I think the exciting developments in the asset class are bank acceptance and credit development in the banking network. We've seen about half of the large banks in the United States start to extend credit against IBIT in the past six months. And a number of banks like Charles Schwab and Citi have announced they're going to start to custody Bitcoin and extend credit against it in the first half of 2026. So I think that the real story in '26 is banker acceptance of Bitcoin, willingness to custody it, trade it, and extend credit against it. And that should catapult the asset class to new levels.

I think that generally public companies will start to buy more digital assets and hold more digital assets on their balance sheet. And I think that Bitcoin adoption is going to spread and that will be good for Bitcoin and that will be good for those companies. I think the real story going forward is going to be digital credit. If you think about the perfect product, the perfect product is a bank account that pays you 10% when the money market's offering you 4%. And so if you can offer people 600 to 800 basis points of additional yield over the risk-free rate, whether it's in the euro, the yen, or the dollar, then everybody's reaction is, 'Yeah, I want that. What's the catch?' And so I think that the real interesting idea is that digital capital, which is what Bitcoin is, is powering digital credit. And digital credit is two to four times more compelling than traditional credit instruments for people that want fixed income.

Bullish. I think the exciting developments in the asset class are bank acceptance and credit development in the banking network. We've seen about half of the large banks in the United States start to extend credit against IBIT in the past six months, and a number of banks like Charles Schwab and Citi have announced they're going to start to custody Bitcoin and extend credit against it in the first half of 2026. So I think that the real story in '26 is banker acceptance of Bitcoin, willingness to custody it, trade it, and extend credit against it. And that should catapult the asset class to new levels.

Yeah, I think that the four-year cycles are based on the Bitcoin halving. And the Bitcoin halving was really important for the first 12 years of the asset because the amount of Bitcoin that was being cut from the supply was very material relative to the demand in the market. But right now you're seeing days when Bitcoin trades $50 billion or $100 billion in a single day. The total amount of the halving in the next halving is going to be 225 Bitcoin. So 225 Bitcoin times even $100,000 a coin is $20 million a day is the impact of the halving. And so $20 million isn't a first-order impact on a $50 billion a day liquidity. It's not even a second-order impact. It's probably a third-order issue. The primary drivers of Bitcoin right now are the structural developments in the market. For example, if the banks extend $50 billion worth of credit, that dwarfs $20 million a day in the halving. And then when the SEC loosened the restrictions on derivatives trading on IBIT, the open interest in IBIT went from $10 billion to $50 billion in a few weeks. So you're talking about tens of billions of dollars of demand for the asset based upon the embrace of the traditional finance establishment. And so the asset class is being driven by the structure of support in the banking industry and in finance and a few regulatory changes that are actually enhancing that support of the asset.