Last week, White House crypto czar David Sacks held his first press conference to discuss the future of crypto policy coming out of the Trump administration.While that will include stablecoin legislation and digital asset regulation, Sacks told CNBC that a top agenda idea is also evaluating “whether it’s feasible to create either a bitcoin reserve or some sort of digital asset stockpile.”But will the momentum around bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies carry over to corporate America more broadly, appearing on balance sheets?To date, companies with exposure to bitcoin in their business operations have been the first movers in this space, in many cases, to show their support and buy-in to the industry. According to the bitcoin tracking website Bitcointreasuries, 79 public companies currently hold bitcoin, with some of the largest holders being companies like Riot Platforms, Coinbase and Block. Strategy, the company formerly known as MicroStrategy, and its co-founder, Michael Saylor, have been the champion of this approach as the largest corporate holder of bitcoin. On its third-quarter earnings call earlier this month, the company said it holds 471,107 bitcoins on its balance sheet, about 2% of the total supply and worth roughly $45.2 billion.Also on the list of crypto industry companies holding bitcoin on the balance sheet is Moonpay, a venture-backed financial technology company that builds payments infrastructure for crypto. The company has added bitcoin to its balance sheet equal to 5% of its operational cash, according to CEO Ivan Soto-Wright.While Soto-Wright said some of the thought process is that “we’re only going to succeed if bitcoin succeeds,” he believes there is a growing argument to include bitcoin in any company’s treasury strategy.“It’s really detached both from interest rates and equity market movements, so you could see it from that perspective,” he said. “You could also see it from the perspective of an inflation hedge .. in terms of large money movement, it’s incredibly efficient so you could argue it’s a better version of gold.” That is one of the arguments that Saylor has made, and one he repeated while making one of the most high-profile pushes to spur a major U.S. company to add bitcoin to its balance sheet, appearing at Microsoft’s annual meeting to speak on behalf of a shareholder proposal that called on the company’s board to evaluate holding bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.Saylor doubled down on that message at the ICR conference earlier this year, where in a presentation he said that companies can either “cling to the past” and continue to buy Treasury bonds, execute buybacks and dividends, or “embrace the future” by using bitcoin as digital capital.“It works for any company,” Saylor said in the retail conference’s keynote speech. “We’re the people building with steel and they’re building with wood.”At least in the short-term, it can look good, too.
Gio. Feb 13th, 2025
