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Michael Saylor speaks on stage during Bitcoin Conference 2023 (Jason Koerner/Getty Images)
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Saylor’s Strategy prepares to buy another $2 billion worth of bitcoin

The biggest corporate holder of bitcoin is selling $2 billion of convertible notes to fund more BTC purchases.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Michael Saylor’s Strategy, the largest corporate bitcoin hodler, announced a $2 billion senior convertible note offering to fund more purchases of bitcoin — a lot of it — and working capital.

The February 18 move is part of the newly rebranded firm’s “21/21” plan, which aims to “raise $21 billion of equity and $21 billion of fixed income instruments, including debt, convertible notes and preferred stock, over the next three years,” according to a January announcement.

To put the size of the issuance into perspective, in 2024, the company spent a total of $22.1 billion to buy 258,320 bitcoin — almost half of its holdings.

“This is expected from Saylor,” said Sid Powell, CEO and cofounder of Maple, an institutional capital marketplace built on the blockchain. “They’re out of the blackout period, having released earnings. BTC is at or below where they were purchasing at the end of 2024. Their playbook is to grow the amount of BTC per share, and by doing this convertible issuance for another $2 billion, they’re able to accomplish that."

On February 5, the company released its fourth-quarter earnings, reporting its largest-ever increase in quarterly bitcoin holdings. Mentioning the 21/21 plan in its earnings call, the company said it was ahead of schedule and had already raised “80% of our $21 billion equity target and 17% of our fixed income target.”

Strategy resumed its bitcoin accumulation following a short breather last week. It added 7,633 bitcoin to its stash, bringing its total to 478,740. As the company wrote in an X post, this represents “~76% of all bitcoin held by public companies.”

In comparison, Mara Holdings, the second-largest corporate bitcoin holder, has 45,659 bitcoin as of February 14.


Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy is a financial journalist who’s written for Dow Jones, The Financial Times Group, and Business Insider.

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JPMorgan analysts noted that “solana is not perceived by investors the same way as ethereum as the main DeFi/smart contract cryptocurrency.”

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BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF is on the cusp of $100 billion in assets, a milestone it will have achieved in less than two years

While VOO might be the largest ETF in the world, IBIT — BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF — is the fastest-growing. And the bitcoin-centered product is on the cusp of a major milestone, reporting that it now holds 802,257 BTC, putting it within a whisker of hitting $100 billion in assets (worth roughly $99 billion in good old-fashioned USD at the time of writing).

Considering that BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust launched only 636 days ago, that’s a remarkable speedrun, as individual and institutional investors have embraced cryptocurrency via the exchange-traded fund. For context, VOO took over 2,900 days to hit the same milestone (about eight years).

VOO vs. IBIT spead to $100 billion assets under management
Sherwood News

As noted in a great piece by Robin Wigglesworth in the Financial Times, IBIT is now a major money-spinner for one of the biggest stalwarts of TradFi. As the largest exchange-traded product in the crypto space, and with a not insignificant expense ratio of 0.25%, the ETF is pulling in somewhere in the region of $250 million of revenue for its asset manager parent company. As Wigglesworth puts it:

“Anyway, it’s heartwarming to see that one of the companies profiting the most from an anarchical, decentralised invention supposedly designed to reorder the global financial system is... BlackRock.”

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Bitcoin ETFs take in more than $2 billion in two days

Bitcoin is down 2.7% from its recent record which saw it passing $126,000, but bitcoin ETFs are still hot.

The ETFs have already amassed more than $2 billion this week, on track to surpass last week’s $3.2 billion in inflows. In total, bitcoin ETFs have just under $165 billion in assets under management, representing 6.78% of the total market cap, SoSoValue data shows.

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust by far took the lion’s share, with $1.8 billion of inflows. The fund is also close to $100 billion in assets, despite not even being 2 years old.

Bitwise CEO Matt Hougan said in a note, “The stars are aligned for a very strong Q4 for flows — more than enough to push us to a new record,” in part thanks to the “debasement trade.” 

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