Michael Saylor Bullish on the Promise of Crypto Regulation

Michael Saylor Bullish on the Promise of Crypto Regulation

MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor called US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s recent speech on digital assets “probably the most important speech of the 21st century.”

Yellen discussed digital asset regulation last week during an event at American University in Washington, DC, noting that risk-driven innovation “should be embraced” and calling for “technology-neutral” regulation.

The conversation came just weeks after President Joe Biden signed an executive order calling on government agencies to work together to study the “responsible development” of digital assets.

“This is a green light for the entire economy,” Saylor said Tuesday during a panel at the Exchange ETF conference in Miami Beach. "All the people who thought [bitcoin] was a Ponzi scheme are being silenced. All the people who said it was perfect and too good to be true so the government is going to take it away, they are being silenced."

Saylor has been one of Bitcoin's most outspoken supporters, and MicroStrategy is among the world's largest publicly traded companies that own Bitcoin.

The managing director tweeted Earlier this month, his company purchased another 4,167 bitcoins for around $190 million - an average price of about $45,700. MicroStrategy held 129,218 Bitcoins as of April 4, purchased for nearly $4 billion.

The purchase came after MicroStrategy subsidiary MacroStrategy secured a $205 million loan from Silvergate Bank last month, allowing the company to buy more Bitcoin.

Saylor had said during a Feb. 1 earnings call that about 110,000 of the company's bitcoins were not pledged as collateral and could be used to generate returns or leverage.

“We operate our business as an intelligently leveraged spot Bitcoin ETF that generates tax-free returns for people who want this type of security,” he said during the conference.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has not yet approved a spot Bitcoin ETF to enter the market. Saylor said that although approval of such a product could be a year or two away, he believes there is a "more than 50% chance" that Grayscale Investments has "the inside track" and gets approval first. The SEC is expected to rule in July on Grayscale's proposal to convert its Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) into an ETF.

Saylor said Bitcoin could disrupt the commercial real estate market as people use the asset as an alternative store of value to a second home, which would bring Bitcoin's market cap to as much as $100 trillion.

Bitcoin's market capitalization was around $750 billion as of Wednesday morning, according to Blockworks.

The asset may also begin to “demonetize” government bonds as investors seek returns, Saylor added.

“A maximalist would look at it and say the first stop is $500,000 a coin, the next stop is $5 million a coin and the next stop is $10 million or above because we expect it will completely upend the paradigm of money and technology,” Saylor said. “Bitcoin is the foundation of the cyber economy of the 21st century.”

Saylor shared the stage with Frank Holmes, Executive Chairman of HIVE Blockchain Technologies, and the two compared Bitcoin to gold.

Gold “will always be there,” Holmes said, but noted that millennials and certain “sophisticated” older investors are moving from gold to bitcoin.

Saylor agreed that gold will continue to be a non-sovereign store of value for certain investors.

"There are a lot of things built in the 20th century that I like. I have a silver belt buckle and I'm going to keep it," said the MicroStrategy CEO. "But you won't make billions and tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars on the ideas of the 20th century; you will simply live comfortably on them. It is the ideas of the 21st century that will turn the world upside down."

. .

The post Michael Saylor Bullish on Promise of Crypto Regulation is not financial advice.