Michael Saylor on Institutional Adoption of Bitcoin & MSTR Treasury Secrets Exposed - Full Interview

Thank you for hosting me.

Well, I think it's a very legitimizing step. It's auspicious for the industry. This year we launched four digital credit instruments: Strike, Strife, Stride, and Stretch. They were all IPOs. They all publicly trade. Those are backed by Bitcoin and they've been very successful, but they've been unrated. Many fixed income investors, insurance companies, and large pools of capital would like to buy them because they have superior yields. They're really cool instruments, but they can't without a rating. Part of the maturation of the entire asset class is getting the traditional credit rating agencies to begin to acknowledge digital credit. This was the first credit rating of a Bitcoin treasury company ever in the industry, and we've been at it for five years. So I think it's a big milestone.

It all starts with Bitcoin, a digital commodity. Bitcoin is digital gold. It turns out that it's also a global asset. It trades 24/7, 365. You can sell it short with 20x leverage on a Sunday morning and then you can reverse and go long 40x a few hours later from Singapore, cross-trading with someone in Europe. That makes it very volatile but very desirable, and for a conventional investor, it makes it a little bit scary. The history of Bitcoin for the past five years is it's been appreciating about 50 to 55% a year and it's been about 50 V. So three times as volatile as the S&P index. If what you wanted was 50% ARR and 50 V, then you would just buy the raw commodity. But if you walk down the street and ask people, would you like to generate 50% returns a year? But you might wake up and lose 25% of your capital in one week. Most people don't want that. So they don't like the volatility. What our company does is we buy Bitcoin and then we issue credit instruments against Bitcoin. For example, some people would like to have 75% of the upside, 5% of the downside, and an 8% dividend while they wait. That's a convertible preferred. And that's what Strike STK is. It's most of the upside of Bitcoin, very little downside. It's like six, seven times over collateralized and it's a dividend. Other people, they don't want that. They just want, for example, 10% dividends forever. I don't care about anything more than that, but if you pay me 10% dividends forever, that's interesting. So, we take an asset that's very volatile that we expect Bitcoin to go up 30% a year for the next 20 years. We expect it to go up more than 20% forever.

Well, we own about 640,000 Bitcoin and that's about 3.1% of the network. 3.1% of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist we have acquired. Most of that we've acquired with equity capital. About $50 billion plus of common equity, about $6 billion worth of preferred equity. And so the company is substantially equity and our primary business line is to issue this credit instrument and every year we sell a bit more equity and we sell a bit more preferred equity and we buy more Bitcoin. So like this week we bought like 390 Bitcoin. Every week we'll acquire a bit more and we just continue to grind up and as we do that, Bitcoin becomes more scarce and because we're buying so much of it, that means the price over time has to appreciate because all the natural sellers get taken out of the market and no one wants to sell unless you raise the price for it.

Yeah, in August of 2020, we were the first public company to make any meaningful commitment to crypto assets or to Bitcoin specifically, and we bought $250 million worth of Bitcoin in August. And then we followed up with another $175 million a few weeks later. We were the first. Then came Block, then came Tesla, then came a dozen or a dozen other Bitcoin miners. By about a year ago, there were maybe 60 companies that owned Bitcoin. And then it doubled. And now I think there's probably 180 companies that own some amount of Bitcoin on their balance sheet that are publicly traded. We're 10x larger than the next largest one in terms of holding. So we're the 800 lb gorilla in the space. I think probably 1.1 million Bitcoin are held by public companies and we own about two-thirds of it. So we're the largest player. We're the first ones to actually issue digital credit instruments like these preferreds that are trading in the public market. But I expect that others will follow. There'll probably be about half a dozen companies over the next 12 months to 24 months that will follow and issue those kind of credit instruments. We welcome those companies. The truth is every single company that capitalizes on Bitcoin takes more supply. There's only 21 million Bitcoin ever. So if Microsoft turned around tomorrow and bought a hundred billion dollars of Bitcoin, that would be great for us, right? So the more companies that buy Bitcoin, the better. Most are just capitalizing on it. They're just buying it in lieu of holding treasuries or holding cash. A company can own real estate. A company can own any other asset. The company can own Bitcoin. So most do that. There'll be a few pure play treasury companies that will also issue digital credit against their underlying Bitcoin, but you need to have more like $10 billion of capital before you can get to critical mass where you could do 500 million and billion dollar IPOs of credit instruments that would be liquid in the market.

The best way to think about Bitcoin is it's the world's first example of a technology that allows individuals or corporations to tightly bind economic energy to their person. If you have a hundred families and they all have some money but they don't trust each other, they don't trust their bank, they don't trust their government, they don't trust any company but they want to keep their money. So they come up with the idea of a digital bank. You write it in software and the digital bank has 21 million coins and anybody can buy any amount of the coins in the bank and that becomes their bank in cyberspace. Now the question is who runs the software? Well I might trust you but I won't trust your great great granddaughter. So we all run the software. Everybody runs the software and then the software continually cross-checks everybody else. And so it's a very elegant decentralized way to create a property network or a decentralized banking network. It's a protocol for economic prosperity. You speak English, I speak English, we can communicate. You use Arabic numerals, I use Arabic numerals. We could do math together. When you offer me nine bananas, I know what nine is, because we both use the same numbers and the same language. Well, what if we want to trade together and we don't want to rely upon any government or any bank and we want to do it for a thousand years? Bitcoin represents that breakthrough. It's the first time in human history that an individual can own anything without asking the permission of someone more powerful than them. If you have a thousand bitcoin and you have the private key, nobody can take it away from you, you can carry it with you. You can send it anywhere on earth. You can take it with you to the grave. You solve the problem that the pharaohs in Egypt couldn't solve. How do you take your money with you? So that's a big idea. Let's just call it a bank in cyberspace where you put your money and no one can steal it. And it's currency in the sense that there's never going to be more than 21 million. So when you buy a Bitcoin, you're buying one 21 millionth of all the money in the world forever. That's the idea. What do we call that? I call it the world's reserve capital network. It is capital. What is capital? Long-term store of value. You're a rich person. Where do you save your money for the next hundred years? Not in a currency. You don't buy pesos. You don't buy euros. You don't buy the US dollar. You don't buy the yen. If you're a rich person, you want to save your money for 100 years, you're buying equity, private equity, public equity. Maybe you're buying scarce desirable art. Maybe you're buying real estate, commercial real estate. The capital assets of the 20th century were like the S&P 500 index or New York or London real estate or maybe sports teams if you're lucky enough to be able to buy one. But what Bitcoin represents is digital capital. If I have a bank and it's a network, I can move the money. I can move a billion dollars from here to Tokyo in a few minutes. So it's a network. But it's also capital itself. If I gave you $10 million and I dropped you in the middle of Africa and I said, 'Buy anything you want. Buy any equity, buy any land, buy anything, buy any bond, buy anything, and you got to keep it for 30 years in Africa.' Or I said, 'Or you could buy $10 million of Bitcoin and by the way, you can send it to Singapore or London or Paris or New York in two minutes from your phone.' I would submit to you there's not a single thing you would buy in Africa. There isn't the capital asset that you want to give to your family or your great grandchildren. The same is true. If you actually talk to people in China, they don't want to keep their money in China. There's a law against removing it from China. In Russia, in Ukraine. If you talk to Europeans, they don't want to have their money locked down in any country in Europe. They want to have their money. Where do people want their money? They want the US. How about Brazilians, Argentinians, Venezuelans? Most of the world doesn't want to take all of their family's wealth and store it locally in real estate, local stocks, local currency, local banks. That's why there are laws against them removing the money. And the problem with gold is if you have all your money in gold in Africa, you can't take it through the airport. If you have all your money in gold in Argentina, you can't bring it out of the country. So the value of Bitcoin is it's digital gold. So if you have your family's assets in Bitcoin, you can take it anywhere you want. No one can stop you from removing it from the jurisdiction. And the more insecure you are about the country you live in, the bank you do business with, the nation state you rely on, or your economic future, the more desirable it becomes. So in a nutshell, Bitcoin represents property rights for the human race. It represents economic prosperity. We'll call it colloquially digital gold, but it's 100 times better than gold. You cannot teleport gold from here to Tokyo with the blink of an eye. And if you have gold, I can shoot you and take your gold. If you have Bitcoin, I can kill you, but I don't get the Bitcoin. And so it is a state change in the economic vitality of an individual, a company, a family, a nation state, the human race. And that's why all of us in the crypto community we revere Satoshi and we think about the world before Satoshi and after Satoshi because before Satoshi everything you owned was subject to the permission of someone more powerful than you. And after Satoshi, after January 3rd, 2009, you could own something for yourself that no one can take away from you. And that is what's caused the entire 750 million person crypto movement.

There's been about half a dozen massive milestones in the past 24 months. The first one was the approval of spot bitcoin ETFs in January of '24 and that sparked the explosion and the explosive success of IBIT which went from 0 to $100 billion in less than two years and it's the most successful ETF in the history of Wall Street. So that was a big deal, the endorsement of the SEC. The second big deal was the red sweep in November when you had a pro-crypto, pro-Bitcoin administration. We went from one supporter in the cabinet, Gary Gensler was a Bitcoin believer, one out of 12, to all 12 cabinet members, the president, the vice president, the head of the SEC, the head of the CFTC, the head of the Treasury, the head of commerce, the head of, you know, RFK, the head of the housing authority, Bill Pulte, Kelly Loeffler, and Howard Lutnick. So you all of a sudden have 12 positive cabinet members from one and that was a big deal. The third big milestone was FASB's adoption of fair value accounting for crypto assets. Before that point, and that took place at the beginning of this year, beginning of 2025, before that point, if you're a public company, you could mark down your losses on Bitcoin, but you could never realize the gains. It's literally an asset where you could only lose, you could never win. The entire accounting rule was a deck stacked against you. Fair value accounting meant that our equity, for example, went from three billion to 50 plus billion in 12 months. But if it wasn't for fair value accounting, we would still have $3 billion instead of 50 billion. So that was very prejudicial and hostile accounting and that flipped in January. I think the fourth big milestone is all of the pro-crypto and pro-Bitcoin guidance that came out of Treasury, the OCC, the FDIC, and the Federal Reserve. The key point there is most banks in the United States and the rest of the world were afraid to custody Bitcoin. They were afraid to lend against it. They were afraid to do business with it under the previous administration. The guidance that came out of the current administration delivered a message which is not only is it safe for you to custody and extend credit against these assets, it's really imperative because the United States wants to be the crypto capital of the world and we want to lead in digital assets and that means our banks need to lead in digital assets. So that you can attribute to the president and to the secretary of the treasury Bessent. I think the next thing was the passage of the Genius Act championed by Senator Hagerty and that created a stable coin environment in the United States. The idea there is why can't we tokenize the US dollar and ship a trillion of it to the rest of the world or maybe 10 trillion dollars of it to the rest of the world because money wants to move at the speed of light and this is the critical part of the crypto ecosystem. The last two banks that moved crypto dollars around were Silvergate and Signature Bank and they were assassinated by the previous administration. They were shut down on a weekend for no good reason. They were perfectly well capitalized and they were literally murdered by regulators. So you can imagine that the banks were afraid to get involved with crypto under the previous administration. Getting a supportive White House, a supportive cabinet, a supportive head of the Treasury, and then a law that says that it is legal for you to do this, I think, was pretty important. That has resulted in an avalanche of institutional adoption. Now you have companies like JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, BNY Mellon, PNC Bank, and Citi that are all announcing their support for this asset class. If the trillion dollar banks are willing to custody and they're willing to extend credit and they're willing to handle the asset class and they're willing to bank the crypto industry, that's really the necessary condition to 10x from here. Bitcoin got to $100,000 without their help, but getting to a million requires the banks to bank the asset. The next four-year period is really about banking Bitcoin and the support for digital assets in general by the major establishment of bankers in the United States and everybody else in the world. You can imagine the bankers in Australia, Canada, Singapore, the Middle East, Europe, Mexico, they all follow the US banking standard. So what you have is an avalanche or a sea change here and the headwinds have become tailwinds.

Yeah. Well, the consensus of all the equity analysts, and there's like a dozen of them that cover our stock, is north of 150, $150,000. Our corporate guidance is targeted at $150,000 by the end of the year.

I don't have a specific target, but in the four to eight year time frame, I think Bitcoin goes to a million dollars a coin. My 21-year expectation is Bitcoin appreciates about 29% a year for 21 years and that leaves it at $21 million 21 years from now. So I think that Bitcoin will appreciate in the range of 29 to 30% a year for 20 years from this point.

I think the drivers right now will be Fed decisions with regards to monetary policy clearly that drives every asset class and we've had a fairly tight monetary policy right now and if that policy loosens that'll be a driver. Other than that, the industry is volatile and the primary actors in this case are the banks and every time a bank makes a major announcement about Bitcoin acceptance or crypto adoption those are all very positive for the asset class and those should come progressively.

I think it's a $2.5 trillion asset class that's been unbanked. Imagine that you started a company, Nvidia, and you gave 90% of the stock to the employees and they went from a dollar to being worth $3 trillion, but no bank would give them a loan against it. So you're an employee. You've got trillions of dollars of capital gains, but no one will give you a nickel loan against it. You cannot get a loan. You could post $10 billion of Bitcoin. You can't get a $1,000 loan from a major bank right now. So what happens is the OG crypto holders, the ones that actually had the capital gain, the only path they have to liquidity is to either rehypothecate the bitcoin and it gets shorted in the market or to sell the bitcoin. So I think we're working through a period where 10% of the supply, or what percentage of the equity in a big tech company would be sold by employees when they all got insanely rich, probably 10-20%, they would sell at least. So we're waiting for that to boil off. We're at the point where everybody knows that Bitcoin is digital gold and it's got institutional acceptance. But banks are very careful, bureaucratic, and process-driven creatures and they should be. If banks get out of control, there's hell to pay. So I think it'll take four years for the conventional traditional banking establishment to get spun up where they're custodying the asset and they're extending credit against the asset and it's worked its way into systems. Bill Pulte has directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to start to recognize this as good collateral, but how long will it be before you can post your Bitcoin as part of your conforming loan collateral? It's a government quasi-government type agency. The credit rating agencies are starting to cover us like we just got covered by S&P, but how long before they acknowledge Bitcoin as collateral or capital that's just as good as holding a share of Nvidia stock or Apple stock? I think reasonably speaking that's a two to four year adoption curve. So between '25 and '28, the traditional finance infrastructure to bank and collateralize and issue credit against this will come online. When that happens, if you think about every asset class, if you can't get a loan to buy a car and if you can't get a loan to buy a house, what happens to car prices and house prices? At the point that the credit market forms over the asset class, the prices move up. So what you see right now are the bank credit markets, the corporate credit markets, and the public credit markets forming on top of Bitcoin. And as they form, that's going to be very positive for the asset itself.

Well, I think that we started with the early shareholders of Strategy. They were Bitcoin and crypto believers who were prohibited from buying Bitcoin due to regulations in the various markets. So, you're a Bitcoin believer and you're a retiree and you live in the UK and you have all your money tied up in your UK retirement plan. It's illegal for you to buy Bitcoin directly, but you can buy our stock. So we've been a vehicle for people who want to get exposure to Bitcoin but can't buy it directly. In the most recent quarter, we've seen a broadening of that base. We're now seeing more institutional investors, more traditional fixed income investors coming in because of the credit instruments we've issued. The S&P rating has opened doors. So the believers are expanding from just crypto enthusiasts to include mainstream institutional capital.

impossible to buy Bitcoin with that money, but you could buy a stock. So you'd buy MSTR. Same in Australia. Actually, everywhere in the world, there are large pools of capital that are tied up in these tax advantaged accounts, IRAs, 401ks, etc., where you might be able to buy a security, but you can't necessarily buy... you can't just say I want to buy a bunch of my favorite artist paintings that are, you know, Art Basel. So the early believers were the crypto enthusiasts that had capital tied up and mainstream investors, big investors that actively managed funds at Capital Group or Morgan Stanley that they believed in the Bitcoin thesis, but they had pools of billions of dollars that were mandated to make equity capital investments. 99% of the professionally managed money is mandated to equity or credit. They can't invest in a commodity. So we offered the first equity to the equity capital investors and what we followed on next was a set of convertible bonds. We became the biggest convertible bond issuer in the world and they were the most successful convertible bonds and there was a lot of money earmarked to convertible bonds. So after we became a substantial part of that market, we outgrew it. And then we went on to preferreds and in the preferred market, we started creating these publicly traded digital credit instruments. They were targeted a different user base. I mean, the person that wants to collect a 10% dividend forever, but they don't want the Bitcoin upside. It's like, okay, I hear you when you say you expect 30% a year for the next 20 years, but just guarantee me the first 10 and you can have the next 20, but take the volatility away and then take the risk.

Right.

So we have rotated from the true believers to the hedge funds that like the Milleniums and Sororos and Citadels that wanted to trade and hedge the convertible bonds, to the credit investors that want long duration sophisticated credit, and then with STRK it's just money market investors. I have some money, I just want more than zero but I don't really want to risk the principal so much.

Which didn't exist 12 months ago. So we're now starting to move into credit indexes. Of course you're a credit investor, you have to buy credit. You're an equity investor, you have to buy equity. We're also in equity indexes. For example, our biggest shareholders are Vanguard and BlackRock through their passive equity index fund. So there's a lot of pulse capital in the world. Some of them, if you lived in Africa and you needed to flee the country and you didn't trust your bank, I would say buy Bitcoin, put it on your own hardware wallet because you can't trust the bank.

If you look at the digital assets industry today, you can divide it broadly into two segments. One segment is digital capital and that is Bitcoin. It's dominated by proof of work networks. Bitcoin is 99% of all the energy and all the capital in that side of the industry. And digital capital means digital gold. And that means, oh, I want to buy something without counterparty risk and hold it for 100 years. And what do you do on top of gold? You issue credit. For 300 years, the Western world ran on gold backed credit. All of our currencies, all sovereign debt, all corporate debt was in essence a form of gold backed credit. So the part of the industry which is most traditional and conventional is digital capital, digital credit, all basically centered on Bitcoin and Bitcoin treasury companies, and that's what our company Strategy does. The other half of the industry is digital finance and that is all about tokenizing currencies, tokenizing securities, stocks and bonds, tokenizing real world assets, tokenizing brands, right? It's Joe Rogan token, right? It's a meme coin, but it's also the dollar. It's also a stable coin.

And if I can self-custody my Bitcoin, why can't I self-custody a million dollars worth of Apple stock? And if I can self-custody, maybe I can actually get bids from the highest bidder and I can send a million dollars of Apple stock to Singapore and get paid for it. So this entire area of digital finance, this is very entrepreneurial. It's all about innovation. It's much more sophisticated and that is the other half of the crypto market. Now, the first half of the market, digital capital, digital credit, that's got regulatory clarity now. Bitcoin is digital capital. The president of the United States has said it, the secretary of treasury, they've all clarified that. So that's pretty much just about issuing traditional conventional credit instruments, taking them public on capital markets. And if there's any hoops to jump through, it's like how do I sell STRK in Euros in Switzerland and get the sign off from the European Union, the Swiss regulator, the exchange? But it's not new law. It's traditional finance law. The other part of the equation requires clarity. I mean, literally the act of clarity. And so the next big crypto bill is the bill that defines and creates the bright lines and empowers what can you do with digital currency? What can you do with a digital token? How do I tokenize my share of stock? How do I tokenize STRC and let it trade at the speed of light in Singapore on the weekend on a crypto exchange? It's not clear how to do that yet.

We don't know what the final bright lines in the bill will be. And once the bill is passed, then it'll be clear what you can do and what you can't do. And so I think that if you're an institutional investor or a conservative investor, you can buy Bitcoin, hold it as a store of value. You can buy digital equity or digital credit instruments backed by Bitcoin. That's all fairly straightforward. I think in the other part of the industry, the digital finance part of that industry, it's very driven by technology. It's very regulatory intensive. And then it's unclear how every jurisdiction will view every regulation. So it'll be a bit more complicated. But we're talking about extraordinarily exciting new ideas. An artist, a celebrity that could own their own brand, a membership that could be tokenized, a ticket that can be transferred.

So there are a lot of things that'll happen and they'll be transformational and innovative, but they'll require more legislation before you're going to find your favorite celebrity do it. They're going to want to make sure they're not getting sued by the SEC.

I think that the key to understand Bitcoin is it is like owning a piece of cyberspace. It is the world reserve capital network. So if you're looking at a world that's going to have hundreds of trillions of dollars of capital on this network, and if we're looking at a world where you're going to see trillions and maybe tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars of credit on top of the capital in the network, right, you might want to own a piece of it. What I say is the United States purchased 79% of the land mass of the country. 79% of the United States of America was purchased for $40 million. That's all of the Louisiana Territory. That's all of Texas. That's all of California. That's all of Alaska. We purchased it before we knew there was going to be Hollywood. Before we knew there was going to be a Silicon Valley. Before we knew the Navy would want oil. We purchased Alaska in 1867. It was Seward's Folly. He was a fool for doing it. It's got trillions of dollars of oil underneath it right now. So if you can actually purchase the future, if you can own cyberspace, you ought to. The Dutch, I think they purchased Manhattan for like a few guilders and glass beads or something. So it's very valuable real estate. In the same way that you want to control the world's reserve currency network, the corollary is why should the US actually sell $10 trillion of stablecoins? Because money wants to move at the speed of light, and if we sell the $10 trillion of stablecoins and if our companies run that network, we will control currency for the next hundred years. And so I think the United States ought to dominate the world reserve currency and it ought to dominate the world reserve capital network. It ought to be the biggest holder of gold.

I think that it's been an extraordinary 180 degree turn for the better by the nation. I think maybe the most profound development of technology in the 20th century was nuclear power, nuclear energy, unlimited, clean, scalable energy. And we shut down the programs for 50 years. And in 2020, if you talk to energy companies, they were going to decommission all those nuclear reactors. And we were asking the question, how do we get this nation to embrace the importance of electricity? And if you want to generate infinite clean electricity, the most efficient way to do it is with nuclear technology. So I think there are two things you want to do with energy. One thing is you want to create digital intelligence, and that's what AI is. And we discovered the way you create digital intelligence is you feed extreme amounts of energy. You feed gigawatts of energy through very customized silicon chips, Nvidia chips, GPUs, and then out comes digital intelligence. Well, the Bitcoin industry discovered the way you create digital money, digital capital, is you take gigawatts of electricity and you feed it through custom silicon ASICs and you generate a wall of encrypted energy to defend the network, and that's what Bitcoin is. So what happened in the last four years was the Bitcoin miners were under pressure for using too much electricity by the environmentalists and we were defending that. We were saying, but we're actually going to create a new banking world order and it's going to be worth hundreds of trillions of dollars, so it's a good use of electricity. But we had a hard time winning that battle. Then all of a sudden we have the ChatGPT moment and people discover that they also need power in order to create digital intelligence, and that turned Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and hundreds of millions of Americans into true believers. And that entire debate about whether electricity is good or bad just went away. And the entire debate over nuclear power went away. And all of those AI data centers, they desperately needed high power data centers. And you know who owned them?

The Bitcoin miners. And as the Bitcoin miners were struggling with the economics of the industry because the way Bitcoin works is it gets exponentially more efficient to mine Bitcoin. So the margins in Bitcoin mining are decreasing. At the point they were struggling, along came a new buyer for those power rights and they were able to pivot and monetize those power rights. So AI and digital intelligence saved the Bitcoin miners. And what are they? They're digital power providers. And ultimately the entire industry, the market is starting to realize the future is digital capital, digital money, digital intelligence. That's the future. And the way you create it is with silicon and electricity. And so if you want your nation to dominate in the 21st century, you better have digital power, you better have digital money, you better have digital intelligence, just like you want air power or sea power or land power 100 years ago. And I think what everybody's realizing is now it's a mad scramble to harness hydro and natural gas. But ultimately the solution is nuclear.

To the Bitcoin skeptics or to the what skeptics?

My message is, if you live in Argentina and you've watched the currency collapse completely every 20 years for the past hundred years and if your family was impoverished five times in the century and an engineer named Satoshi came along with a way for you not to be poor and destitute, then he said, it's no more difficult than just put this wallet on your iPhone and now you don't have to be poor. Then you would be utterly captivated by that vision. And that is the plight of everyone. If we go by my hand and say how many people have lived in societies where they had their property rights and their wealth stripped away from them, everybody in Africa, everybody in South America, Brazil's currency collapsed, Argentina's currency collapsed, Cuba's got no currency, Venezuela collapsed, everybody in the Middle East, people in Turkey right now, Russia collapsed 30 years ago, Russia's collapsing now, everybody in Ukraine, everybody in China doesn't trust their currency. Everybody in Europe doesn't trust their currency. So if you're a skeptic, you must be an Upper East Side trust fund baby and you're lucky enough to be born rich in the only country in the world where the currency didn't collapse in the last 100 years. And your currency has lost 99.9% of its value over 100 years. The US dollar has debased 7% a year on average for a hundred years. So you're probably smart enough if you're wealthy and a skeptic to know that you shouldn't store your family's assets in cash dollar bills. You're probably smart enough. You're privileged enough to be able to invest in US real estate and US equities because you know that wouldn't work in any African real estate or any African equity, or any North Korean equity, or any Chinese equity, wouldn't work in Japanese equities either. In fact, I could go on and on. So you're a privileged person that happens to be rich or happens to have money that's invested in the world's most secure assets in the US. But Bitcoin is digital capital and it's for everybody else in the world that wasn't as privileged as you. For them, it's the difference between 7 billion people living in destitution and 7 billion people having hope. So Bitcoin is an idea whose time has come. If you're one of those people, you're going to cling to it like a diabetic would cling to insulin. Before Bitcoin, every company in the world, everybody in the world is a type 1 diabetic. They cannot store economic energy. So if you're in that situation, that is life affirming for you. It's not a laughing matter. That's why people are so passionate about it. But let's say you're not one of those people. You happen to be one of the 500 million or a billion elite that lives in a very comfortable environment. It just happens to be the best idea for you. It's the ultimate alternative investment. It's an asset uncorrelated to a currency, uncorrelated to any nation state. It's not an equity. It doesn't have counterparty risk. So the reason you ought to look at it, it's the most valuable real estate property. It's basically buying a piece of cyberspace. And if you had a chance to buy an acre of Manhattan in the year 1700, you would have been paying top dollar for it. And then every decade for the next 300 years, someone would pay more. And at what point did buying land in Manhattan ever become a bad idea? It's still a good idea. And Bitcoin is cyber Manhattan. One day 8 billion people want to put their money there. And there's only 21 million blocks. That's 276 by 276 by 276. You can't make any more of it. So our view is it's just a good idea. It's the best idea for a conventional investor, but it's a life-saving idea for the rest of the world.

You know, I think that the people that are inspirational are the industrialists that took a technology and they commercialized a product and gave it to the world. So you got John D. Rockefeller, he came along, looked at crude oil and extracted kerosene and eventually extracted gasoline and diesel. And we first heated our homes and lit our houses, but eventually we ran our cars and our jets and our rockets. Kerosene as rocket fuel and jet fuel. And then take Henry Ford. He took a fire and an explosion, put it into an engine, wrapped it onto a carriage, and gave everybody an automobile. And he basically gave everybody the ability to travel 100 times as fast and safely. And history books are full of people that died because they had to walk a hundred miles and they caught pneumonia. So Ford gave mobility to the world. I could go on with Boeing and you could look at the iPhone and the radio and the telegraph and the development of penicillin, antibiotics. But if you look at Bitcoin right now, Bitcoin is this scary explosive crypto thing. People are afraid it's going to blow them up or hurt them. What we're doing right now, the thing I'm most excited about, our iPhone moment, is STRK. Because STRK is a high yield bank account. I want my money to generate 10% tax deferred income forever. Where are all the moving parts? There's no moving parts. What's the product? Comfortable retirement. What's the alternative? 2 or 3%. So you're just going to give me five times more money. What do I got to do? Well, what do you got to do to drive a car? Believe in the engine. What do you got to do to fly in an airplane? Believe in the plane and the pilot. What do you got to do to get five times more than your bank's offering? Believe in Bitcoin and then this issuer Strategy. So our job is to get people to trust us and then give them a comfortable retirement or just give them money. We're essentially selling money by using digital technology to double or triple someone's yields.

2025 is the first year of institutional adoption of digital assets. So if everything that I'm saying sounds new or scary or novel or you never heard it before, that's because 12 months ago, Donald Trump hadn't won the election. And 12 months ago, your bank would have been shut down had they even tried to suggest this to you. So we are living in a very special period where it's just like in 1902, every learned person would have given you a hundred reasons why human beings will never fly. And in 1904, it was obvious that we were going to fly because we flew in 1903. So we're like 1904 for digital assets. It's pretty obvious. The president's told you it's a commodity. The cabinet's told you. The head of the treasury's told you. All the banks are moving. But the way it works is the traditional finance world is going to take 10 years. Vanguard's going to tell you, well, we're afraid of crypto assets. Don't buy it. But Vanguard's my biggest investor, passively, but actively. Even though they're the biggest investor in my company actively, they haven't quite got around to processing the fact that the digital form of everything is a hundred times better than the analog form. Digital photos, you had Kodak, then you had Apple. Digital books, digital gold, digital video, digital whatever. We're living through the digital transformation of the capital markets, and people weren't sure that was going to happen a year ago, but now they're happening. And you've got a 10-year digital gold rush. So the beauty is you can make a lot of money if you are willing to do the work. If you're willing to do the research and spend 10 hours thinking about this or 100 hours, well, you can buy Bitcoin for a 99% discount. If you wait until the year 2035, your bank's going to tell you, 'Yeah, it's easy. We all support it. It's good. We'll label it as that.' Then you're going to pay 10 times more. And if you wait until the conventional wisdom is this is the world's greatest asset class, well, it's going to be $10 million a coin and you're going to pay a hundred times more. And so you're living through a technology transformation where you get a massive discount and you get paid a lot if you think for yourself and if you do the research and you come to a conviction over this issue. And I couldn't have said that two years ago, or six years ago. We needed the president of the United States to endorse it. But if we don't get that, then you get a different future. So this is a special year and there are special opportunities and I would encourage everybody to focus on it and come to their own conclusions because it's the most auspicious development in the capital markets in my lifetime.

Yeah, thank you.