MicroStrategy at H.C. Wainwright: Bitcoin as Digital Capital

On Monday, 08 September 2025, MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR) participated in the H.C. Wainwright 27th Annual Global Investment Conference, where Founder and Chairman Michael Saylor outlined an optimistic vision for Bitcoin and the broader cryptocurrency market. Despite a challenging stock performance, Saylor emphasized the strategic importance of Bitcoin as digital capital, highlighting both opportunities and risks in the evolving crypto landscape.

Key Takeaways

• MicroStrategy has accumulated nearly 640,000 Bitcoin, valued at over $70 billion.
• The company raised $47 billion in equity capital over the past five years.
• Predictions of a $10-$20 trillion crypto industry by 2028.
• Significant increase in public companies holding Bitcoin, now totaling 180.
• New financial instruments like Strike, Strife, Stride, and Stretch were introduced.

Financial Results

• Bitcoin Holdings: MicroStrategy’s holdings have reached nearly 640,000 Bitcoin, valued at over $70 billion.
• Equity Capital Raised: The company has successfully raised $47 billion in the past five years.
• Recent Bitcoin Purchase: On the day of the conference, MicroStrategy purchased $217 million worth of Bitcoin.
• Bitcoin Per Share: There has been a 25.8% increase year-to-date, with a target of 25% for the year.
• Cost of Capital vs. Bitcoin Returns: The cost of capital is 14%, while Bitcoin returns have reached 55%.
• Annual Return: The company reported an impressive annual return of 92% over the last five years.
• Leverage Potential: There is potential for 30% leverage with preferreds, amplifying returns by 2.8 times.

Operational Updates

• Public Company Adoption: The number of publicly listed companies holding Bitcoin has increased from 60 to 180 in the past year.
• Bitcoin 100: A collective of companies holding over 1 million Bitcoin.
• New Financial Instruments: Launch of Strike, Strife, Stride, and Stretch, each catering to different risk and yield profiles.
• IPO Activity: MicroStrategy completed four IPOs this year, including the Stretch IPO.
• Retail Demand: There has been a significant increase in retail demand, with $600 million raised in two days during the last IPO.

Future Outlook

• Crypto Industry Growth: Michael Saylor predicts a $10-$20 trillion crypto industry by 2028.
• Bitcoin Adoption: Expectation that nearly every American with assets will have crypto exposure by 2028.
• Credit Market Opportunity: MicroStrategy aims to enter the $80 trillion global credit market with Bitcoin-backed instruments.
• Leverage Potential: The company sees potential to reach 50% leverage, further amplifying Bitcoin returns.
• Long-Term Value Creation: The focus remains on long-term value creation for equity holders, with the goal to outperform Bitcoin by 2-4 times.

In conclusion, readers interested in a detailed exploration of MicroStrategy’s strategic insights and financial performance are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - H.C. Wainwright 27th Annual Global Investment Conference:

Operator: Welcome

Michael Aneze, Managing Director and Crypto Analyst, HC Wainwright: back, everyone. Welcome back. I hope you are all ready for what I believe will be one of the best presentations at this year’s conference. But I must admit, as a Bitcoiner and the covering analyst on strategy stock, I’m a bit biased. I’m Michael Aneze, managing director and crypto analyst here at HC Wainwright, and I am very excited and honored to introduce our special keynote speaker for today.

He is the founder and chairman of the world’s first and largest Bitcoin treasury company, Strategy, a company that has accumulated nearly 640,000 Bitcoin worth over $70,000,000,000 in just five years, and he probably purchased another 5,000 this morning before the event. Since launching its Bitcoin strategy in August 2020, his company has generated significant shareholder value with MSTR outperforming Bitcoin in every stock in the S and P 500 over the period. Our speaker was a true visionary, recognizing and harnessing Bitcoin’s value as a treasury reserve asset long before it was popular to hold on your balance sheet. And without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming the pioneer behind the Bitcoin treasury strategy, the Bitcoin maxi of Bitcoin maxis, a man who needs no introduction, Michael Saylor. Okay.

Operator: I’ll forgive you if you’re not wearing an orange tie, but we got we got extras on our company store. Thank you for joining me today. I’m gonna speak a bit about commodities. I’m gonna speak about equity. I’m gonna speak about credit.

I’m gonna talk about how to create a huge amount of shareholder value and what I find to be most exciting in the coming four years. Well, let’s start with the commodity, Bitcoin. Bitcoin is digital capital. And and the years 2020 to 2024, those were the crazy years where a few people would have agreed with me. Most people didn’t agree, and even more people didn’t understand what that phrase meant.

I think that from 2025 to 2029, these are gonna be the the years of rapid institutional adoption acceleration. And if you had to put your finger on one catalyst for it, it’s that man right there. The red sweep in November catapulted the entire crypto economy into the mainstream. The headwinds that were blowing in the face of Bitcoin and crypto in general became tailwinds. The you know, we had a president that said, never sell your Bitcoin.

I’m gonna make America the Bitcoin superpower of the world. I want us to be the crypto capital of the world. I would say that the world the worldview toward Bitcoin coin was grudging acceptance before November. I’m gonna let you know, Gary Genslow would have said, I’ll let it live. I don’t like it.

I can’t kill it. I acknowledge that it is not a Ponzi. I hate everything else. And after November and after these sweeps, the view became, oh, Bitcoin is a crypto commodity. We like a lot of things going on in the economy.

We like $24.07, $3.65. We like stablecoins. We like crypto exchanges. We like money moving at the speed of light. We like self custody.

We like property rights. We like digital. We like global. We like the future. This is a force of progress.

Right? The entire attitude switched from one of grudging acceptance to one of enthusiastic embrace. We had one cabinet member a year ago that would have acknowledged Bitcoin exist as a thing, and every other cabinet member would have been ignorant, skeptical, or cynical. Now we have 12 cabinet members who are enthusiasts. They like it.

The head of the FBI likes it. Think about the fact that Tulsi Gabbard is a Bitcoin fan or Kelly Laughlin or Robert f Kennedy or the vice president and the president. This is an extraordinary sea change. Maybe the I don’t know when in the history of the capital markets you went from people not acknowledging the legitimacy of an asset class to the entire cabinet enthusiastically embracing an asset class. Right?

That’s happening, and we’re not even twelve months into this. The White House is embracing crypto, and it’s embracing Bitcoin, and it’s driving positive policy all throughout the government. The ETFs that Wall Street launched, you know, not even two years ago are the most successful ETFs in the history of Wall Street. We’ve got one 500,000 held on those ETFs. That’s exploding.

BlackRock’s ibid is just an explosive phenomenon right now. I think it’s like the number four ETF. In four to eight years, it could be the number one ETF. That’s how fast. It came out of nowhere.

Our company was the first public company to buy Bitcoin in August 2020. We bought $250,000,000. People fell off their chair, thought we’d gone insane. That was the most amount of money it’d ever been invested in a crypto network in the history of the world. I didn’t know that.

It just seemed to me like it was a good idea for us, and and and and so we moved, but then it was two and then four and then 20 and then 40. We had about 60 about a year ago, and we’re up to a 180 publicly listed companies. So the last twelve months has been explosive. Even the past six months has been explosive in terms of public company adoption. This morning, we announced we bought $217,000,000 worth of Bitcoin.

I didn’t feel like it was a lot. Last week was a four day week. It’s four day week. But keep in mind that we spent it took us thirty years to buy $250,000,000 in August. And and so it gives you a sense of scale on how things are moving.

This this chart gives you another view of this. What’s the significance of this? Okay. Well, here’s the significance. When your best friend decides they wanna buy Bitcoin, they sweep 10% of their cash flows into it.

When a private company wants to buy Bitcoin, they sweep half their cash flows into it. When a public company decides to buy Bitcoin, they become a viral super spreader. MetaPlanet was a $10,000,000 bankrupt hotel chain in Japan a year ago, and they have found a way to buy $2,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin in, like, twelve months, they may be the largest hotel company in the world in another twenty four to forty eight months. They may be the largest company in Japan in four to eight years. What you’ve got with a public company is public companies aren’t limited to, oh, I only spend a $100,000,000 a year.

I can spend a $100,000,000 a month and double it every month. Right? Once it’s more like, you know, I I start a fire and I throw it into a gasoline warehouse, and the thing becomes self feeding, and it just takes off. So so every single public company could become a billion dollar, 10,000,000,000, or a $100,000,000,000 amplifier. Right?

They’re all amplifiers of this movement. And and that’s the part that is so incredibly powerful. There’s probably nothing more powerful than putting a commodity, capitalizing a public company with a commodity and then having it public and then plugging into the capital markets. Because at that point, the company begins to issue securities, whether they’re equity or or or credit instruments, and that’s a rinse and repeat trade. Right?

How much equity capital can you raise? Well, our company had we started with a $250,000,000 buy, and we raised $47,000,000,000 in five years. So, you know, what is that? Well, I mean, at this point, we raise more capital in a day than we could have generated in earnings in a year. Right?

You’re you’re accelerating by a factor of a 100 or a thousand. Which one of these companies will do that? Well, there’s no telling, but the point is they’re popping up in The UK, in France, in Sweden, in Brazil, in Japan, in Canada, everywhere. And each one is a different capital market, and each one of these is a super spreader of the Bitcoin virus. There’s a Bitcoin 100 now.

Companies are racing to get into it. They just we just crossed a million Bitcoin in that group, and that’s going to probably accelerate. A lot of the companies on the left side of the screen, you know, Twenty One, Bitcoin Standard Treasury company, they’re in they’re at Nakamoto. They’re all coming out of despacking processes, and they’ve been in registration and kinda dormant. Once they get through that process, they go active.

And at that point, they can start to issue effectively unlimited securities of equity or credit instruments, and they become amplifiers. Now if it turns out there’s a 180 companies holding Bitcoin, then you gotta imagine all the equity analysts start to have an opinion on Bitcoin. And so this is a roundabout way of getting Bitcoin coverage in the traditional equity capital markets. And every one of these analysts is covering our stock and putting a price target on Bitcoin. They’re all above 150,000 for the end of the year.

Thomas Lee declared 200,000 for the end of the year this morning. Tech investors. Philippe Lefant has designated Bitcoin like the number three interesting tech idea in the world. It used to be before 2020, people thought, well, Bitcoin, it’s a it’s a crazy crypto speculative asset. And as long as people think of it as this as a crypto casino speculation, it it’s never gonna get respect to the mainstream.

When you start to look at it as digital capital, I, you know, I took a billion dollar block of gold. I dematerialized it. I move it at the speed of light. I vibrate it a million times a second, and I distribute it through a billion microprocessors. That becomes very interesting to people that made billions of dollars investing in Google and Apple and Amazon and Facebook.

And, of course, you know, where is all the money in the world? A lot, you know, a lot of the money in the world is people that bought the mag seven at the right time. So Bitcoin as a technology is much more compelling than Bitcoin as a speculation or even as an ideology. Financial regulators have now embraced it. You know, three it wasn’t two, three years ago that the regulators summarily assassinated Silvergate and Signature Bank.

They murdered those two banks. Right? There’s nothing wrong with those banks other than they were actually too crypto forward and too innovative, and they got shot in the head. That chilled the entire banking establishment, the credit establishment, the insurance establishment. When my company bought Bitcoin, our insurance carriers dropped coverage.

I had to provide DNO coverage for my company because we were deemed too risky. It it took us when we had a $50,000,000,000 of hard collateral, they still thought we were risky, and it took about five years before that turned again. So it’s pretty important. I can’t I can’t overstate how important it is that now you have the head of the FDIC, the OCC, treasury, the Federal Reserve, all articulating pro crypto, pro Bitcoin guidance. This this opens the door for the traditional finance establishment to bank the asset class and to support the asset class.

And you can see from the, you know, the guidance coming out of the SEC, this is a 180 degree switch. You’ve got the CFTC and the SEC, both pro innovation, pro Bitcoin, pro digital assets. And and we’ve gone from an environment where people were mortified to do anything to an environment where they’re enthusiastically charging forward. Bill Pulte directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to accept Bitcoin or or figure out how to accept Bitcoin as collateral for a conforming loan. Okay?

This is tremendous. Right? If Bitcoin makes its way into the mortgage credit industry, you know, the mortgage industry, then what follows next is it finds its way as good collateral in the consumer banking and the commercial banking industry. And people all they ask the question, like, what’s keeping Bitcoin from flying at 500,000? The answer is there’s $2,000,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin capital gains, and people with that money can’t get a loan for a nickel.

Okay? So that entire asset class is unbanked. It’s like your employees on a startup made $2,000,000,000,000, and no one will give them a loan. So they have to sell some of their stock. So what you have is a lot of crypto OGs selling Bitcoin right now because the asset is not really financeable.

That’s changing, and it’ll probably take, I guess, four years. Big banks are bureaucratic, risk averse institutions, and they’re large institutions. And look, I don’t blame them for being risk averse. If the regulator literally murdered Silvergate in his signature, I can see why you as the CEO of a bank might be just a little bit conservative about touching that thing. Right?

The tone at the top was chilling a few years ago, And this administration has gone out of its way to actually reverse the polarity on that. We’ve got three bills to move through Congress. I mean, the Genius Act is passed. The Clarity Act is is this fall, and then the Bitcoin Act. The real key here is this is a very pro crypto, pro pro digital assets, pro Bitcoin political environment.

There’s no reason to think that will change in the next four years. And what’s four years mean? Well, we’ve added about $2,000,000,000,000 to the crypto economy in a few months. Like, from November, we went from 2,000,000,000,000 to 4,000,000,000,000 or some something. I would think that we’re staring at a 10 to $20,000,000,000,000 industry by 2028.

The genie is not gonna go back in the bottle. There’s no way you put a $20,000,000,000,000 industry. You got forty, fifty million Americans that own this right now. Give it four years with the flow into four zero one k’s and retirements. Substantially, every I will go out on a limb and say, substantially every American with assets is gonna own some amount of crypto exposure, and they’re gonna own some decent piece of Bitcoin by 2028.

I I I find it hard to imagine where the it will be hard for them not to. You know, the CEO of Vanguard became very famous for saying he didn’t think Bitcoin was an asset. It didn’t generate cash flows, and they wouldn’t let their clients buy it. Do you know who the largest shareholder is of my company? Vanguard.

Okay. So you think about that a little bit. Right? Kinda hard to stop an idea whose time has come. States are embracing it, and it’s and governments are embracing it.

This is just going to get louder. And and the crypto industry industry in in general, general, it went from a lot of infighting to to being largely aligned at this point. And and I think there’s an appreciation amongst the crypto networks, the token, the DeFi, the crypto exchanges, the Bitcoin advocates that the entire industry is better cooperating with each other than they are fighting with each other. And following November, I just saw remarkable alignment of interest and a coalescence of a of a a formation of a coalition. This coalition, the entire crypto industry, is probably the most powerful political actor in the space right now because they can marshal something like 50,000,000 voters, and they’re just so so distributed and diffuse in their influence and also very aggressive, very aggressive in driving this forward.

So so the entire industry has become very politically active. Now that’s the backdrop. Right? As you can imagine, I’m I’m bullish on Bitcoin. I’m bullish on the entire crypto industry.

I’m bullish on digital assets. And I think that there’s a surge globally, worldwide, and there really isn’t I I don’t see any organized resistance at this point. Right? There are just various degrees of of of bullishness at this point. People that don’t have anything good to say generally just say nothing at all.

They’ve learned not to walk in front of this truck. There’s no upside in standing against this. So I I think it’s just about the most positive environment that we have seen in the history of the industry. Now what is our company? We are a new class of company, a treasury company.

Now what’s challenging for people is wrapping their head around a Bitcoin treasury company, and that’s because Bitcoin is a new asset class, and treasury company is a new corporate type. Now why is it the you know, what is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is the first digital capital. It’s the first perfect money. Well, we never had perfect money in ten thousand years of economic history.

The Austrians never saw it. The libertarians never saw it. The political scientists never saw it. You can’t blame them for not factoring into their thinking. They just never saw it because it was impossible to create until you had semiconductors, public private key cryptography, and the Internet.

So Satoshi, like Galileo, you know, Galileo came up with telescope. You know, we have a telescope, and all of a sudden, the Copernican revolution is is afoot. Well, we needed Bitcoin for there to be that monetary or capital revolution, and that’s what coin is. And and most of the world still doesn’t get it, but that’s good because the way that you make 10 to a 100 extra money is to figure something out while the majority of the world doesn’t agree with you or doesn’t get it. When they all agree with you, it’ll be a not good investment.

It’ll be a mainstream investment. You need to be right, but you need to be just early enough that 95% of the people think you’re wrong. That’s how you make obscene amounts of money. So, I mean, that’s Bitcoin. But we put together two novel ideas, treasury company.

What is a treasury company? It’s a company that accumulates capital and then issues securities against the capital, especially issuing credit. Right? What do we do? We’re selling credit.

Right? What does a bank do? A bank buys credit. A bank is basically buying your mortgage. We are reimbursing it.

We are we are creating securitized Bitcoin. We’re selling an annuity. When you buy Stretch, which is like a 10% annuity, we’re selling you the annuity or you buy Strife. We’ll we’ll give you 10% at par forever, and you’re buying it from us. Now how how are we promising to give you a dividend for a hundred years?

That’s a long duration liability. We, you know, we need a long duration asset. So Bitcoin is a long duration asset. Right? You would wanna hold it for a decade.

It’s high volatility. It’s long call it a hundred and twenty month duration, 50 vol, 50 ARR. It’s a very powerful financial asset, but most of the world doesn’t want a 120 of duration, and they don’t want 50 vol, and they don’t want years where they get nothing and years where they this year, we got a 100%. They don’t want that. So a treasury company sits between that uncertain long duration, highly volatile, high energy future crypto economy, and they strip it down, and they give you a one month duration, 10% yield, low vol, low risk financial instrument out the other end.

You’re securitizing digital capital or securitizing digital property. Why is it that’s never happened before. Why isn’t there an a magnificent seven treasury company? Why can’t you do this with Apple and Tesla? It’s because the SEC 40 act made any company holding more than 40% of its liquid assets on its balance sheet an investment company.

You cannot lever a 100% or a 150% the balance sheet of a publicly traded company in The United States with securities. There is no S and P treasury company. There is no mag seven treasury company. There is no Tesla treasury company. Would there be a market for it?

If it was legal, absolutely. What I’m doing, what we’ve done, you could do with the S and P, but the challenge is not in the current regulatory environment. So public companies for the since 1940, call it, you know, for the last eighty five years, they have had to either surrender their capital. They can give it back as a dividend. There’s only one security that Apple can can buy.

One security. It’s called Apple. They can buy their own security. They can they can buy back their stock. They can dividend out their stock.

They can hold short dated treasuries, money markets, or, you know, one month treasuries or or sovereign debt. They could buy real estate or gold, but, you know, that’s illiquid. Or they can do some acquisition. But you see, what what makes treasury companies possible is the creation of a commodity because you can hold a 150% in commodities or a 100%. A commodity that outperforms the S and P, that is the magic trick.

Like, I can create a digital commodity that’s garbage. I I if I were to inflate Bitcoin 27% a year, every year add in to an item, it would be a commodity, but it wouldn’t be a good investment. The world’s full of commodities that are bad investments. In fact, arguably, every commodity other than gold has been a bad investment over the long term, over ten years. So so you need a commodity.

It needs to outperform the S and P, and then you need to be able to lever a public company. Okay? So when did you know for sure that that was gonna work? Well, arguably, after November 5. So the reason this is exploding is because you had to be a believer in August 2020, but you all you have to do is be a reader.

You just need to read the press and listen to what people are saying in the last nine months to know that you can actually do this. And the and a public company levered on a commodity can arbitrage the return of the commodity versus the cost of credit or the cost of equity, and you can do it in an almost I’m not gonna say risk free, a very low risk way. The the most intelligent way to generate leverage on a good idea is a public company issuing instruments like preferred shares or some kind of long dated public debt. It’s a much better idea than, say, a margin loan from your local crypto exchange. So we’ve raised $47,000,000,000 of capital over that time frame.

Most of it equity, A little bit convertible bonds, and about 6,000,000,000 is preferred equity. And you can see it’s every single quarter we’re building up. We have a little bit more than 3% of all the Bitcoin in existence. Clearly, we believe in the network. We’re we’re basically ratcheting the network up.

And as as we buy Bitcoin, we take it out of circulation, and then the price has gotta move up so that people can find a willing seller at a much higher price. Now these are all the greatest companies in the world. We have come out of nowhere in five years to be the fifth largest treasury in the entire S and P. Why? Because we are positively polarized to capital.

They are negatively polarized to capital. If you talk to the CFO of any of those companies, with the exception of one, Berkshire Hathaway, The only company on this chart where the guy that runs it would say, I’m gonna keep my capital and invest it for the good of my shareholders is Warren Buffett at Berkshire. Everybody else would say, we’re gonna return the capital to shareholders. We have a capital return program. We’re raising the dividend.

We’re raising the buyback. And they crow about it like it’s some achievement. But I hear them say it, and what I think in my mind is they’re saying, we have no freaking clue what to do with the money. We we don’t have any idea, and so we’re just gonna give it back to you. You figure it out.

I’m like, really? You have no idea. Okay. Well, it’s okay to surrender the capital unless you’re Intel and you need it. You know?

It turns out that companies like Intel and DuPont, they return the capital to shareholders. They’re worth less than the dividends. Like, do you really wanna run a company where you basically cashed out and you eventually dwindle to nothingness while you leave a stream of dividends and buybacks in your wake. And it’s like like ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Why do companies die?

Why do you have a ten to fifteen year life expectancy for a corporation? It’s it’s because of their financial practice. It’s because they’re surrendering their capital as fast as they can. If I bled you to death, you would die quicker. Like, if I if I showed up at family, you know, Thanksgiving dinner, and I said, I have a great idea for the family.

Let’s give away all of our money so that our balance sheet isn’t volatile. I mean, that’s kinda what’s happening here. And you’d be like, okay. Well, great. I guess someone else will figure out what to do with all of our money.

But what if our family needs the money? Don’t worry. We’ll just work harder, raise our prices, and cut our salaries for our employees if we need the money because that’s what they do. So so that’s not a good idea. And the real revolution here is what if we actually replace share buybacks with Bitcoin buys?

What if we actually stopped the dividending out the cash flows? What if we reinvested the cash flows? You’re like, well, I can’t do it in money markets. You’re right. You can’t.

What can you do it in? You need something that outperforms cost of capital. If you find that if I can return more than the cost of capital, I can, in theory, raise infinite money. If I return less than the cost of capital, I can, in theory, raise no money. Right?

I either I’m either beating the cost, I’ll give you infinite, or I’m underperforming, I’ll give you nothing. All these companies have chosen a balance sheet strategy to underperform, and therefore, they deserve nothing. They have to give it all away. Right? They’re just levering themself until they’re $20.20, $30.40 dollars of enterprise value for $1 tangible assets.

What happens if you have a bad quarter? Well, you know what happens. Stock crashes. We raised 22,000,000,000 last year, 19,000,000,000 this year. We’re doing it with a variety of different instruments.

Right? It’s iron it’s not lost upon me, the irony, that every great company in the world is in the business of getting rid of their capital as fast as they can, and we’re in the business of collecting it. What if what if the collective geniuses running all those other companies reversed the polarity and started collecting it instead of throwing it away? My job would be a little bit harder. Right?

But right now, we’re literally siphoning up the capital that’s being pushed into the economy by them. We did four IPOs this year, and we did the biggest IPO, which was Stretch a few weeks ago. And, you know, well run companies only do one IPO. My first IPO was, like, $3,540,000,000 dollars. Right?

And it and it was pretty hard. This one was really easy. Right? And and, of course, the irony is what would happen if a Tesla or what would happen if an Apple or a Microsoft did an IPO today? Right?

It’ll be massive, but they’re not doing that. Right? Again, they’re not in the business of issuing securities. They’re in the business of buying them back. We are building markets for our securities.

So one market is institutional active investors, another is passive investors, the third is retail investors. So the retail channels for our retail demand for our securities really dramatically increased with the last IPO. I think we had really about $600,000,000 of retail demand in two days. And so we’re building that retail business. This chart probably is the most important chart I’m gonna show you today.

If you just bear in bear down on it, the cost of capital for the past five years is 14%. That’s the S and P. Long dated bonds are minus 4%. That’s why every bank was in trouble financially when the Fed raised interest rates. If you had short dated money like money markets, you’re probably getting 2%.

If the cost of capital is 14, then all the capital that you hold is minus 12% real yield, you’re destroying 12% of your treasury a year. That means in five years right? Cut it in half. Bitcoin is 55%. You know, the mag seven is double the S and P.

Bitcoin’s double that, and our company’s, you know, about 80% more. But what’s the opportunity here? Well, the opportunity is you fund you fund your company with the cost of credit down here or with the cost of equity, and then you invest it into the digital ecosystem, into Bitcoin, coin, and you just grab the spread. And you can do that effectively risk free. For example, we have a product Stride STRD.

We pay 12%. It’s a noncumulative preferred. We’ll give you 12% ad infinitum. We buy Bitcoin. It’s a perpetual swap.

We’re gonna get everything more than 12%. We’ll compound it. You’ll get to 12. We could sell a $100,000,000,000 of that. We could sell a trillion dollars of that.

Why? Because it’s noncumulative, and we could suspend the dividend, and we never repay the principal. So you’ve you’ve created, as a public company, a risk free, unlimited, scalable swap, but it you know, to the extent that Bitcoin performs at the S and P or better, it’s a screaming winner. You know, Bitcoin could underperform the 12%. And by selling the volatility and and utilizing the float, we would still make money on it.

But if Bitcoin performs more than that 12%, then we start to compound at a at a extreme rate. And that’s the kind of instrument that you can’t make unless you’re a publicly traded company and you can issue securities. So our business is let’s outperform Bitcoin, and then let’s find a way to tap into the right side of this chart. You can by the way, you can see why there are no gold treasury companies or real you know, real estate and gold are hard is because they don’t outperform the S and P. It’s a little bit challenging.

But to the extent that you make money in real estate, you could see the way you do it is you lever it four to one. Right? When you look at that chart, if you can lever real estate two to one, three to one, four to one, five to one, ten to one, right, then you could probably make money. Nobody’s figured out how to lever gold. This is the last year, and you can see, you know, Bitcoin’s up a 100%.

What how do we measure success? Well, our business is to generate additional Bitcoin per share every year. So if you’re buying strategy stock, you own a certain amount of Bitcoin, and then we add more. Last year, we added 67,000 Satoshis per share. And then this year, we’ve added 41,000 Satoshis per share.

So you’re making money by increasing the Bitcoin per share, and then the Bitcoin price is going up. But ultimately, the difference between a Bitcoin treasury company and a Bitcoin ETF is an ETF like BlackRock’s gonna have a certain amount of Bitcoin, and you’ll lose 20 basis points a year. That’s the fee. You’re never gonna have any more. But an operating company, you’ll have a certain amount of Bitcoin, and then you’ll have more each period thereafter.

And we call that increased BTC yield, Bitcoin yield. And so this year to date, we’ve had 25.8% increase in Bitcoin per share. Right? Our target was 25% for the year. You know?

So if a company said, well, we’re gonna increase the share the share of bit the amount of Bitcoin you have per share by 25%, then you would think, well, it’s worth a premium to the underlying asset. So you’re you’re valuing the company at a premium to the reserve because it is accreting Bitcoin through its operation. For the longest time, ExxonMobil was valued at a premium to its oil reserves on a similar logical basis. Here’s a snapshot of our business model. On the left side is the crypto economy.

We we start with Bitcoin. It trades 60 to 70,000,000,000 a day. It’s this long duration, volatile, high energy, high performance, very scary asset, and it’s global. And it doesn’t stop. And the traditional finance economy doesn’t want it, can’t buy it.

What they want is they want an equity or an option or a credit instrument and a wrapper that they can deal with. So if you buy just wrapped Bitcoin, you’re buying iBit, which is BlackRock’s big ETF, and that’s been very successful. But what you’ll get is the volatility, the duration, and the performance of Bitcoin. What we’ve done is create credit instruments that strip the vol, strip the duration, strip the risk, strip the performance off of it, and we sell that as convertible bond or a convertible preferred or a fixed long duration preferred or this stride instrument, which is a noncumulative preferred or the latest thing we did, which is stretch, which is a money market. What’s the idea?

Well, strike a structured Bitcoin. I’m gonna give you the upside, downside protection, and a guaranteed dividend while you’re waiting. Right? So think of it for more conservative investors. They don’t want the the roller coaster ride.

What they want is, like, a guaranteed 8.4% yield, and they wanna be senior overcollateralized in the capital structure. And they want, like, a 35, 40 delta instrument. They’ll get 40% of the upside of MSTR stock, but they won’t be getting the downside. And they give up that performance for that principal protection. What are we competing against?

We’re not competing against the company. We’re actually selling this to people that would otherwise buy the S and P index, or they buy commercial real estate, or they buy into a hedge fund. So strike is that is that hedged upside with an 8.4% effective yield, and you could buy that instead of buying real estate. You know? And then and you can see the performance and the size of the market.

It’s a $90,000,000,000,000 market. I mean, people just kinda want they want some hedged upside and a guarantee. What’s interesting about this? What’s interesting is we can create billions and billions of dollars of this instrument, right? We’re not just selling it.

We’re originating it. We’re backward integrated. So when you buy when you buy into a real estate fund, they have to go and develop the property. When you buy this instrument, we create it in seconds. Right?

So so we can create it a thousand times faster. It’s all homogeneous. So digital credit. Right? What’s strife?

It’s long duration credit. It’s like a it’s like a perpetual bond. And so if you want a certain yield, you want 9% yield for the next hundred years, that’s what you want. That’s, you know, it’s effectively twelve, fourteen year duration, which means that if sulfur dives, you’re gonna wanna hone this because this thing is gonna be yielding 9% when SOFR is 2% or 1%. So it’s like hundred year bond.

Way overcollateralized, 7.6 times overcollateralized in BTC. A mortgage backed security is 1.3, 1.5. Right? So the perception is these things are risky, but the but the reality is they’re not you know, they’re the most over collateralized credit instruments in the market. Who are you aiming that at?

Well, we’re aiming that at long dated investors, most of whom are looking at a four handle, 4%, 5%, 3%, and we give them 9% if you’re that long dated credit investor. Stride, it’s high yield credit. So we’re aiming that at the junk market. It has a 12.7% effective yield, but it’s nearly five x over collateralized. So loan to value would be, like, 20%.

You’ve got $5 of Bitcoin for every dollar of this asset that’s issued. If Bitcoin were to crash 80%, you’re still collateralized. If you think Bitcoin’s gonna go to zero, you don’t wanna buy any of this stuff. But if you actually think Bitcoin is just volatile and it may go up and down, then all this stuff is within your wheelhouse. What’s the universe of comparable assets?

Well, there’s $2,000,000,000,000 of money invested in closed end fund, high yield corporate bonds, you know, preferred stock ETFs. And you can see, for the most part, the liquid things you can buy are six or seven handle. We’re offering 12. And what is stretch? Stretch is the most aggressive piece of financial engineering we’ve done.

Because with stretch, what we did is we took that hundred and twenty months of duration to one month. And we took the idea was, I don’t want volatility. I don’t want principal risk. All I just want is something that pays 400 basis points or 500 basis points more than my bank account, and I want the money back when I ask for it. High yield bank account, high yield money market.

So we target price stability a 100%. And, of course, if you walk down the street and you say to a 100 people, do you want a thirty year Bitcoin bond that yields 9%? You know, you get, like, one, two, three out of a 100. But if you say, would you like a a high yield bank account that pays you 10%? Well, that’s like 95 out of a 100.

Everybody wants their bank to pay them 10% instead of 4%. So this is a much simpler idea. To do it, we had to create a completely variable monthly rate. And this, for the most part, is like the first time anybody’s done this on a crypto asset. There might have been one company that created a variable rate in the last thirty years.

But this is fairly innovative to create a preferred stock where the dividend rate changes every month. No one else had a reason to. In essence, we’re creating we’re we’re becoming like the central bankers of the crypto economy. We’re creating a currency. We’re setting the rate for the currency, and we’re pegging it to the dollar.

Right? And that’s what’s going on here. So if we trade below parity, we’ll raise the rate. If we trade above parity, we’ll lower the rate or above par. And what are we aiming at?

Well, we’re aiming at 30,000,000,000,000 of money market type instruments. Right? Your bank accounts, your money market funds, your short term treasuries, your commercial paper. And what are they yielding? 4% in The US right now, but probably not 4% for much longer.

They’ll probably be with a three handle shortly. So this pays two to three times as much. You just have to believe the Bitcoin’s not going to zero tomorrow. This picture shows you the engineering we’ve done. What you can see here is that MSTR has got a 56% trailing vol.

That’s the high vol equity. That’s the highest performance security. That’s the roller coaster. That’s Bitcoin with rocket fuel. Strike is 37 vol.

Strife is 27. Stride is 20. Stretch is 14. They’re still in the first six months. It’s the first year, so we’re seasoning them.

But our goal is to season them and then move move stretch down to below five. Right? We wanna we wanna get all of these to, like, fall into the right price performance volatility category. And over the long term, we’ve laid the framework so that we can build out the entire yield curve and the entire risk curve. So if you if you studied, you know, the insurance business, you know, and thought about or the mortgage backed security business, you know, you’re tranching risk and you’re tranching duration.

We could create a preferred that would give you would give you the yield with a trailing twelve month delay, and it becomes a perfect twelve month instrument perpetually rolling forward. And we create a perfect thirty six month instrument just rolling forward perpetually each month. Right? And so if you wanna create a perfect one year, three year, five year, seven year, nine year, ten year instrument, you can do it on this framework. And the beauty is they’re very precise, and and the credit risk is is substantially.

I don’t know if I wanna say an order of magnitude less, but it it’s some large factor less than using a bond because bonds come due, but perpetual preferreds never come due. And you can see the the effect of these. We take them public. We put a shelf registration on them. This is our preferreds versus the liquidity of all the others.

You could see most preferred stocks are illiquid. Right? They’re illiquid, undercollateralized, opaque, heterogeneous credit. Why would you wanna buy it? The answer is you wouldn’t, and so people don’t.

But what if they did? Right? What if we created one that was not defective? Right? What if we created a $50,000,000,000 preferred that traded $23,000,000,000 a day, and it actually offered 400 basis points more yield?

Well, why wouldn’t you want that? Right? And this is the collateralization of preferreds. And you can see here, most stuff is under collateralized, and we can over collateralize because of Bitcoin. If you look at the ETF environment, you see handles of six or seven.

Now it’s very difficult to pay much more than that when the source of your credit is real estate or corporate junk or unrated corporations. But the source of our credit is digital capital, and my long term forecast is about 29 a year for twenty years. My bear case is, you know, better than the S and P. So we actually can offer much higher rates without concern. Let’s look at the universe of comparable assets.

So you see, you look at treasuries or agencies or investment grade bonds. You can see collateral coverage one, two, one, one, four. Right? They’re all under collateralized. The durations if you want long duration, they’re not long enough.

You know? If you want short, they’re not short enough. If you want liquidity, you can almost never get enough. It’s very difficult to get the right combination of duration and liquidity and yield. But you put all those things together, and all of the volatility and the performance we strip off the credit instruments accrues right to the equity.

So that’s how we create amplified Bitcoin. And the results speak for themselves. We’ve got a 92% a year return for the last five years running, and and that’s allowed us to create the most vibrant options market. That’s what allows us to generate the overall return. It’s what allows us to attract capital.

And what’s the target for the equity? Well, we target the, you know, the the S and P 500, the Mag seven, people that might that love Bitcoin. Well, what’s better than Bitcoin? More Bitcoin. Right?

So you’re like maybe you buy the Bitcoin spot. And what’s the result? Well, we’re up 16% year to date, a 181% in a year, 92% every year for five years. How does the amplification work? Okay.

So I have 200,000 Satoshis a share. If I did nothing, if the company stopped, if we all went on vacation, we’ve got a $72,000,000,000 business growing 55% a year. That’s what the business is. We’d keep that Satoshi per share. But if we issue credit to lever it up 10%, if we if we basically issue $7,000,000,000 worth of credit on $70,000,000,000 of Bitcoin, you can see the Satoshis per share start to accrete.

When you crank that up to 20%, you go to $15,000,000,000, then it accreades much faster. And if you get to 30% leverage, you know, and and you could do 30% leverage pretty easily with preferreds even without risk because the preferreds never come due. So you’re actually on the hook for the dividend, but not for the principal. So you can see here you get an amplification factor of 2.8. So you’re getting, on the back end of this, 2.8 times more Bitcoin than you started with.

If you put these into tables, what you can see is that when you run with 30x leverage, if Bitcoin grows 30% a year, you’re gonna actually get three times as much as if you held the underlying ETF. So what’s the source of the premium? It’s the credit amplification. Where does the amplification kick in? Well, this is kind of, you’ll recognize this from the banking model if you understand banks and why how they use preferreds or any kind of levered finance model.

The amplification kicks in as you get more leverage. It kicks in if the underlying Bitcoin grows faster because you’re compounding that. It kicks in if the if the dividend rate falls or the cost of capital falls. Right? If you’re a MetaPlanet and you go to Japan and you issue a preferred stock in Japanese yen at 5%, you’re gonna get a lot more leverage, and you’re gonna get and you’ll get more amplification.

You can see it here. Right? You go from from 10% to 5%, you go from 1.9 to 2.3. And so what you can see here is that by using intelligent leverage, you can find a way to generate two, three, four x the normal Bitcoin performance. And that just leads you to the question of credit risk.

Like, what is the risk? So this is a credit model. This is actually the capital structure of our company. And what we’ve done is created a model. We put it on our web website.

You can run it. Just go to the credit tab of strategy.com. You plug in the price of Bitcoin. It updates every fifteen seconds, by the way, and you can override it. You can plug in your expected volatility and your expected Bitcoin growth.

And if you’re a skeptic, you think Bitcoin’s going nowhere for a hundred years, then you would plug in 0%. And what you would see here is that all the convertible bonds are investment grade in terms of their risk, and then half the preferreds are mezzanine, the other half preferreds are high yield. But when the volatility falls from 40 to 35, you can see they all start to get upgraded. And if the vol falls to 30 and Bitcoin trailing thirty day vol was 30 just a few days ago, if if the volatility of Bitcoin falls to 30, you see that the credit starts to improve on all these even if you’re a skeptic about the future of the asset. So the inputs are the price, the vol, and then the outlook.

Now if you’re not a skeptic, if you’re a trader, if you think Bitcoin is as good as the S and P but a bit more volatile, you could see most of this stuff starts to look investment grade. All you all you have to believe is that Bitcoin is as good as the S and P for you to engineer all of these things and find what are extraordinary spread premiums. Right? Like, just extraordinary. If Bitcoin goes up 20% a year, you see all the risk gets stripped off of this and, you know, the the fair credit spreads fall to, you know, a few basis points.

And that’s what the market doesn’t quite appreciate yet, but that’s the opportunity. As credit rating agencies get involved, as people start to look at this, this is digital credit. Think about the difference between digital credit and real credit. If I show you a $100,000,000,000 of mortgage backed securities and there’s, like, a 100,000 different homes and there’s all these tranches, it’s all heterogeneous. But when I show you Bitcoin, you’re getting a quote everywhere in the world every second, twenty four seven, three sixty five.

It’s all transparent. So so in the digital credit world, there’s no reason to wait for a year for a credit rating agency to write a report and deliver it to you. You can literally plug in your own outlook and generate your own risk profile and make your own decision. And so this is to say it’s an order of magnitude more transparent might be an understatement. Now if you’re a maximalist, if you believe in Bitcoin, I.

E, you know, someone that holds our equity, when you plug those numbers in, even in a volatile environment, what you see is the risk drops away, and every single thing on this table becomes investment grade. Now you might say, well, yeah, Mike, but if I believe in Bitcoin, I’d only buy Bitcoin. Well, not not quite because there are a lot of Bitcoin believers that need money for the next twelve months. They have a treasury. They have working capital needs.

They have families. They have to pay their kids’ tuition in the fall. So they believe in Bitcoin, but they still need instruments that are more stable than Bitcoin. And there’s a lot of Bitcoin maximalists, believe it or not, that won credit funds. They run equity funds.

They run fixed income funds. They run credit funds. They work for a living. You know? And in their case, they’d like to buy something with this kind of exposure.

And when they look at this, what do they see? You see strides showing a 868 basis point spread premium. That’s mispriced risk. That means you’re getting paid 8.6% for no risk. If you had a fund and could invest in that and you believed in Bitcoin, then then that’s easy money for you.

So from our point of view, you know, it’s not complicated where we head. What we do is we gradually just park the preferreds above a hard capital layer of Bitcoin, and then we build the equity out. We equitize the convertible bonds over time. So the converts, half of them are in the money. So we’ll just let them become equity because they don’t trade in the public market, and we build up the stack of preferred instruments, and we grow those instruments.

We become the leading issuer of Bitcoin backed credit. Right? And just as an interesting thought experiment, what happens if we equitize all the convertible bonds? And this is a skeptic looking on our our preferred stock after the bonds disappear. And you see the top two preferreds look investment grade.

What happens when you’re not when you’re a trader and you think Bitcoin’s going up 10% a year? They’re all investment grade. You know? And then what happens next? Well, then you can go to 30% leverage or even 50% leverage.

So you see, how do you get to 50% leverage? You have a 100,000,000,000 of Bitcoin. You issue $50,000,000,000 of preferreds. The 50,000,000,000 never comes due. You gotta come up with $34,000,000,000 worth of dividends.

The company trades up to 250, 300,000,000,000. You dilute half a percent or 1% a year, and you roll the thing forward, the equity holders get two to four x Bitcoin return. What’s the risk? Bitcoin crashes. There’s no credit incident.

There’s no credit risk in it. This becomes an extremely robust or antifragile balance sheet. So I’ll end just with a few thoughts. What why do we trade at a premium? Why do we exist?

What is the logic of a Bitcoin treasury company? Well, it starts with credit amplification. You need an operating company to sell credit. The world wants credit. Right?

The credit amplification gives the equity two to four times the underlying perf the performance of the underlying asset. That creates the options advantage. You end up with a much deeper, more vibrant options market. Then you’re able to tap into passive flows and institutions. Now how important is that?

These are the global credit markets. Take a look at that. 75, 8, you know, $90,000,000,000,000, you get 4% yield in The US, you get 2% in Europe, you get one and a half in Japan, you get 55 basis points in Switzerland. The credit markets are sick. Like, they’re not healthy.

These people are yield starved. It’s getting worse. Right? So selling the credit is like, well, how much are you gonna sell? Well, take 1% of that.

It’s $800,000,000,000 worth of credit instruments. So so the market is massive there, and they all want to be paid 400 basis points more than that number. How how important is passive indexed money? There’s $17,000,000,000,000 of capital in passive funds. 85% of it is equity indexes.

15% is credit indexes. Nobody thinks that long term capital is investing in a commodity index. The commodity index funds are point 1%, 10 basis points. That is to say every commodity other than gold or silver is a dog, And anybody in gold or silver is not in a index fund. They’re in gold or they’re in silver.

So what’s the significance of this? The indexes the credit index need to buy credit. The equity indexes need to buy equity. There’s $17,000,000,000,000. This is my this is my shareholder space.

Look at the top 100 shareholders. 57% of the shares are held by passive indexes. So Vanguard, BlackRock, two of my five biggest investors, they’re passive. They’re not active. Only 43% of those shares are held by active managers.

Now that’s just a sample of the top 100, but the top 100 cover 46% of the company shares. What that’s telling you is there’s going to be a substantial flow of credit and equity capital to Bitcoin treasury companies because this is not gonna unwind itself. People aren’t gonna wake up and say, oops. I think I should just, like, not allocate to the S and P or the Nasdaq one hundred. So this is structural, and this is structural.

If you look at managed capital, 60,000,000,000,000 is credit, 35,000,000,000,000 is equity, Only 3,000,000,000,000 is commodities, but the commodities are mostly gold held by central banks. They’re not selling. So ultimately, you have maybe $700,000,000,000 of capital that might find its way into a commodity like Bitcoin. The world wants equity and credit, and the only way to create equity and credit is to take an operating company public, build a huge capital base, a big equity base, and then start to tranche off, you know, BTC 10 rated, five rated, three rated instruments. And, you know, when we have you ever seen, like, a big block of lucite and a a computer generated milling machine?

You put your image into the computer, and it it mills it out of the lucite. You get this beautiful sculpture. That’s what I think when I think about what we’re doing. We take a block of digital capital, Bitcoin. We take digital intelligence, and we design a preferred security.

You tell me what yield, what duration, what kind of risk, what collateralization, what do you want it to look like, and we generate the digital credit from the digital capital. We sell it to the market, and we can sell it as much as the market wants to buy. You wanna buy 500,000,000 right now? I sell you 500,000,000 right now. I will create it on the fly.

You wanna buy 5,000,000,000? You wanna buy 50,000,000,000? Right? We have certain rails. Like, you know, at some point, we’d be under collateralized, so I can’t just, you know, slam it to a BTC rating of two overnight if it’s supposed to be a senior instrument.

But to a much greater degree than any issuer of credit in the modern world, Bitcoin treasury companies, especially a well capitalized one, can create the most compelling high performance credit instruments and do do it fastest and quickest. And that’s what the market wants. So I’ll just end with this slide. Our principles are simple. We buy Bitcoin.

We hold Bitcoin. We’re exclusive. We wanna be homogeneous credit risk. We wanna be homogeneous in our capital strategy. We prioritize long term value creation for the equity.

So everything we’re doing, think, I hold the equity, look out ten years. Is this a good idea for ten years from now if I’m an equity investor? We ask that question. We treat all of our investors with respect. If we told you we’re gonna do something, we do that thing.

And we structure the equity to outperform Bitcoin. You know? If we can do two x, we’ll do it. If we do three x, we’ll do it. If we could do 1.5 x, that’s what we’ll do.

And then we continually acquire Bitcoin as long as it’s accretive. Right? There’s none of these transactions are ever dilutive. We’re always generating yield. We’re always selling securities at a premium to the underlying asset NAV.

And then otherwise, you know, week by week, day by day, we react to the market. The credit markets, the macro markets are changing all the time. They can change from the morning to the afternoon. I can I’ve seen him change from the point that Jerome Powell starts a press conference to when he finishes answering questions. They’ll go this way and that way twice.

We’re reacting to that all the time in all of our capital programs. And, you know, ultimately, we don’t have to do anything. We have the option to just do nothing for three months or six months. And if we did nothing, we have a $72,000,000,000 company growing 50% a year, which is just about better than anything else I’ve ever seen in this market. So our our default is not bad, so do no harm.

When we see an opportunity to do something good, we do it. And in the meantime, we promote global adoption of Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset. And why? Because I think all the companies in the world are type one diabetics. I think they can’t retain their economic capital or energy.

And and if you want your company to live forever or you wanna live healthier or happier, then you want a capital asset that allows you to retain your cash flows and grow your shareholder value without surrendering capital. It’s a very simple idea, but it’s a powerful idea that’ll work for a private company or a public company. And and if you’ve ever seen a great company brought to its knees and torn to pieces because it was undercapitalized or you were on the receiving end of of that situation as an investor or an employee or a customer or a constituent, then you understand what I mean. And so with that, I wanna thank everybody for your time and your attention. Appreciate it.

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