Why Bitcoin Now: Michael Saylor on the Best Way for Companies to Buy Bitcoin - Ep.209

hi everyone

welcome to unchained your no hype

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i'm your host laura shin a journalist

with over two decades of experience

i started covering crypto five years ago

and is a senior editor at forbes was the

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today's guest is michael saylor founder

and ceo of microstrategy

welcome michael thanks for having me

since events and bitcoin move so quickly

i want to let the audience know that

we're recording on the afternoon of

friday

january 22nd this morning microstrategy

announced it announced it had purchased

another 10 million

worth of bitcoin quote in accordance

with its treasury reserve policy

micros microstrategy already has 1.1

or had already purchased 1.1 billion

dollars worth of bitcoin in 2020 that

is now worth about 2.3 billion dollars

is the treasury reserve policy

simply to allocate any excess cash to

bitcoin

yes um we keep a certain amount of

working capital in u.s dollars

or in the local countries in yen and

juan and euros where we need it

and generally we target about 50 million

dollars and then anything we generate

from the business

uh in excess of that we work to sweep

into our treasury and then

as soon as practicable we convert it

into bitcoin

and why did you decide to do that that's

you know obviously quite a different

switch

from how pretty much any other company

out there works

so why did we adopt bitcoin as a

treasury reserve asset you know i think

that if uh

if the u.s dollar was debasing

at the rate of five percent or less a

year at two percent

my perception laura by the way was the

us dollar was pr

was debasing at two percent a year you

know the inflation rate is two percent

people preach

we will not allow inflation to be more

than two percent so

if you just listen that you think well i

guess cash is maybe losing two percent

of its value or one percent of its value

or

you know jerome powell says we can't get

inflation we don't have any inflation

yet so

the average person would maybe think

that the u.s dollar didn't lose

two percent of its value this year and

that was my perception for a decade

and i think um the jarring k-shape

recovery that started in march

caused me to question all of my premises

and all of my beliefs about

macroeconomics i mean

i mean let's be honest right you run a

software company

you're not really a macro economist

right you're not really thinking about

macroeconomics asset classes currency

trading currency devaluation monetary

inflation

i didn't know what i couldn't have told

you the difference between m1 and m2

money supplies or the rate of monetary

expansion

in february of this year it just i could

have preached to you all day long about

apple watch i could have told you what i

thought about

the the transformation of mobile devices

and wearables and

phones and how it's going to change

politics and sociology i care about tech

i didn't really pay attention to money

so i think that

march was a jarring wake-up call and

what i

well you know somewhere along the line i

started reading macroeconomics and i

discovered safety's book the bitcoin

standard and then i started looking at

the rate of monetary expansion then i

realized it was about five and a half

percent for the last decade

and then i realized the asset inflation

rate was five and a half percent the

cost of capital was five and a half

percent

and everything clicked and then i

realized that the cost of capital jumped

to 25

this year and everything double clicked

and then i realized the cost of capital

was going to stay at 15

or more and then i realized that

if we didn't do something we were

screwed yeah

so uh you know then despair sets in or

despondency and

and um you know if if everybody had

confidence in the currency and they have

confidence in their asset strategy

there's no need to do anything different

when you have a crisis of confidence

you have a crisis of confidence in a

country you leave the country right i

mean if you had all your money in

argentine pesos at some point you lose

confidence

if you lost confidence in venezuelan

boulevards at some point

you realize you got to leave i think

this was a crisis of confidence when we

saw the k-shape recovery

and at that point

i realized i either needed to invest the

money wisely

or i needed to give it back to the

shareholders and uh

the giving it back to the shareholders

is like it's a it's a nice flippant

thing to do but you know then you

decapitalize the company and then you

have no assets

and if you run into if you run into a

business

crisis you become insolvent and you're

bankrupt and

then things get really bad so we decided

we had to

come up with a treasury strategy

we were forced to by monetary

circumstances

and bitcoin uh looked to me

and to the company to be the most

rational highest quality

technically most perfected asset if your

goal

is to hedge yourself against monetary

inflation and is this money then that

you don't

imagine that you'll need to tap at any

time soon

because so i know um bitcoin can be

volatile

in both directions but let's say it was

a bear market

then it's like that kind of like

long-term investment money that you just

don't feel like you're gonna need to

touch

yeah the decision was made easier for us

because we're about a 500 million dollar

company and we were generating

25 to 30 million in free cash flow in

feb

per year in february but when we went

through the lockdowns

and and the transformation to what i'll

call the virtual wave

all of our all of our marketing sales

and services dematerialized

virtually and we started doing things

via zoom

online our microstrategy world

cost three and a half million dollars

last year

and this year i couldn't spend the money

even if i wanted to spend the money

that's your annual conference yeah

yeah it costs three and a half million

dollars to collect 2500 people in a room

now think about how much you spend to

collect 2500

people in a room well um

here's a good factoid for you are our

business

travel and entertainment expenses year

over year

it decreased by what percentage do you

think

99 98

98 okay it's a lot of money so

so to make a long story short the uh

the company's cost structure compressed

our cash flows

expanded and all of a sudden we realized

we're going to generate not 25 million a

year probably more like 75 million a

year

and so we we're cash positive

what's the second observation you can't

use you can't throw people at the

problem anymore

hiring 10 000 people to knock on doors

doesn't work if there's nobody behind

the door they're not going to answer the

door

right you can't throw money at the

problem the

you know you don't throw money at the

problem you throw intellect

and acumen the world wants to see the

most

entertaining musician the most

intelligent analyst

the most charismatic articulate

communicator

they you know and that's what moves so

um we realized that we weren't going to

spend that much money we couldn't spend

that much money

if the company's going to be successful

it's because the software works and

people want to buy it

and you better do everything you can to

make it less

friction free right more friction free

so

brute force strategies that involve

money and manual labor

stop working we have a lot of money we

have 500 million dollars in cash

we have the at the expectation of

generating another 500 million dollars

in cash

so there's a billion dollars in cash and

cash flow

and you know i guess the you know good

news bad news is i give you a billion

dollars and the bad news is it's not

going to be worth anything in

five years or ten years it won't buy

anything houses went up twelve percent

year over year

so you have to make 12 more to buy the

same thing you could have bought last

year

so why do we adopt this strategy well

well we have cash we're gonna have cash

you can't use cash to grow the company

anymore

what can you do with the cash you can

either buy the stock back

you can dividend it back to the

shareholders or you can invest it

what are you going to invest it in well

how about uh an asset

inflation hedge that you you can't make

any more of

pure monetary energy now did we actually

consider buying the stock

sure we did we actually uh tendered to

buy back 250 million dollars worth of

stock uh at the same time as we

bought the bitcoin uh it was the 250

million dollar acquisition of bitcoin in

a 250 million dollar

tender offer and the idea was give every

shareholder that disagreed with the

strategy of investing in bitcoin the

opportunity to exit

their equity position at a profit was a

dutch auction

with the premium so uh some people did

most didn't we took the excess cash we

invested in bitcoin you know and if

bitcoin was trading at 10 000

right now we would have 500 million

dollars of bitcoin and be waiting to see

how the strategy works out but bitcoin

traded up

and it's more than that and so now we've

we're i mean our treasury now is uh

up 1 billion 300 million

dollars the stock is up

we have we now have a balance sheet

which is in excess of like 2.3 billion

dollars a bitcoin

and now the question is what happens

with bitcoin right i mean a business is

two pieces

uh your right hand your left hand the

right hand is your p l

your left hand is your balance sheet

okay so

you can grow the business by growing the

p l twenty percent a year or thirty or

fifty or a hundred percent a year if

you're genius

that's that's hard but i mean you can do

it that way

you can also accumulate shareholder

value by growing the balance sheet by 10

20 30 a year if you told me bitcoin was

going to grow by 20

a year i would think well if you're

a year and you have 2 billion on your

balance sheet then you're going to

generate 400 million dollars

in in investment income or or

uh or shareholder wealth in the 12

months

that's a lot easier than doubling well

if we doubled the revenue of the company

we still couldn't do that right right

like

we would have to increase the revenue

company by a factor of five

yeah okay so you know there

you can compete that way or compete the

other way i mean some people

you know some people kind of get irked

like it's like you're cheating

by making money an easy way well

everybody on wall street's making money

that way and

every financial company on earth is like

making money by

by holding or trading assets or using

their balance sheet

every bank does right so we simply

adopted a strategy

that would allow us to create

shareholder value which is

good for the employees good for the

shareholders

good for the brand good for the product

nobody wants to buy

software from a company where the stock

is going to zero

nobody wants to work for that company

either right

well one thing that's so curious to me

is so you

heard about bitcoin quite a long time

ago and famously tweeted back in 2013

quote bitcoin's days are numbered it

seems just like a matter of time before

it suffers the same fate as online

gambling so i'm so curious because

you know i just feel like a lot of

people have this story where they start

out as critical and then suddenly they

kind of have a light bulb moment

and i was wondering what was it that

someone said to you or what was it and

how they explain it to you that finally

made you a convert was it literally just

the pandemic

or was there something else i don't

think we'd be here if it wasn't for the

pandemic

it's the events of march of 2020 i think

there was a catalytic month

the k-shape recovery the lockdown of

main street

and the rapid recovery of wall street

forced everyone to review their

assumptions

about the way economy works and the way

you create shareholder value

and uh so that was uh that was critical

i think the the economic response of

um of the bankers was kind of critical

right i mean if the cost of capital goes

from 5

to 15 that's a catalytic event

i it's very difficult to generate

shareholder value when the hurdle rate

is

5 the risk premium is 4 percent

you have to get an eight percent yield

or an eight percent increase in cash

flow

every year in order to create

shareholder value

and if you can't get eight percent or

more

cash flow growth what can you do you can

leverage up

you can borrow a billion dollars buy

back half your stock

and you can take a four percent cash

flow growth company and make it look

like eight percent

and so you can almost make that work

from 2010 to 2020 right and so you look

at every publicly traded company or

every company you

you can imagine how you know how do you

make stocks hold value you leverage up

how do you make real estate whole value

you refinance which is leveraging up

how do you make bonds hold value you

refinance them how you do that you keep

lowering interest rates

if you can lobby in order to get the

bankers to lower the interest rate from

five percent to four and a half to four

to three and a half to three to two and

a half

you're leveraging up the bonds as you're

leveraging up the real estate and then

you're leveraging up the companies

and you can use that to take a five

percent grower and make it look like a

10 or 15 percent grower

arguably apple did that in the last few

years if you look at

apple's apple's revenues are flat for

three years its stock has doubled

right its uh cash flows were fairly flat

but it was buying back its shares

so that's one way to be successful the

other way to be successful is to be

google or facebook or amazon

what they did is they grew 20 top line

and 20 bottom line so if you're growing

20 percent top line and bottom line

in an environment where the cost capital

is 5

that works right you hold that stock you

made money

that was a good trade now what happens

to every stock where you can't leverage

up and you can't grow more than the cost

capital

they don't hold value okay so it's

interesting until 2020 but in march of

2020 it became

um untenable right because whatever you

think you might have done

at five percent cost of capital when it

goes to 15

or 20 percent cost to capital and you're

fully leveraged up and the interest rate

is at near zero

at that point how many companies are

there in the world how many companies in

the s p 500

can grow their cash flows and their

revenues

25 like it from from now

from this point right right i mean it's

it just is impossible right

one percent five percent last year maybe

it was like zoom

nine ninety percent can't so coming back

to my

observation right when do people

discover new ideas when you're faced

when you're

forced into a corner when your back is

in a corner

when do people make paradigm shifts in a

war

when they die or when there's a war

right when the old generation dies and

that you know peter schiff's son likes

gold

right bill miller's son likes bitcoin

right when

when the new millennials the pair a new

generation comes along

they might get it otherwise you need a

war

and uh you know what was the war the

currency war

when i actually crank up the inflation

rate of money by

a factor of three or four then you can't

ignore it so

what do i think in 2013 look i didn't

have a problem

i was you know my i had a solution the

solution was buy amazon buy apple buy

facebook by google

that was the investment solution and in

business

i had a business i was going to sell

enterprise software and i had to

i had a conservative treasury and we

invested our money in

in t bills and cash and you know laura i

remember when you could get five percent

interest on it on

overnight money five and a half percent

on uh

on repos no duration risk no credit risk

investment grade okay so that i mean

there was a time

when it would be rational and

responsible for a public company's ceo

to invest their cash in uh

in in those treasury assets and then if

you have excess cash you gradually buy

the stock back and we did

we bought back 300 million dollars with

the stock like large sums and then you

do your best to compete with microsoft

oracle sap ibm

and that's what you do well uh i think

what happened is a the inflation rate

went from five to fifteen percent

b we saw a k-shape recovery uh extreme

screaming success all the financial

companies are doing great this year

all of the you know service companies

and main street companies you know are

struggling

if you happen to have a stock on wall

street maybe you're getting a pass but

if you're a private cash flow business

and you're not financiable you can't get

cheap money

you're not right they're struggling so

so you have that on one hand

and on the other hand bitcoin matured i

mean

bitcoin was one two three years old

you have to check the box will the irs

give it property treatment

uh will the sec deem it property that's

a pretty big deal being property and not

a security right you saw what happens

with ripple when you're a security

right it's illegal for cynthia alumnus

to promote a security in congress

whereas promoting property ownership in

congress

is the american way and so so that

decision is it property or is it a

security is pretty critical

i think if you look forward you say

bitcoin's been de-risked will it be

forced well it was and we know what

happened

will it be hacked it wasn't will it be

banned it hasn't been banned

is there any rhetoric to suggest they'll

ban it no except in china but you know

you know what else china

banned they ban google twitter facebook

okay how how those trades do in the last

decade

so china is totally consistent they

banned the information network

they ban the mobile network they they

banned the speech network

and they're going to ban the monetary

network and bitcoin's the monetary

network and that just means in the

western world in europe and the us

bitcoin is going to be the predominant

digital monetary network and then

it'll be it'll have rails on it be right

regulated in the same way that stocks

and bonds are

and when it is all the crypto anarchists

will be freaked out that there's some

regulation

and all the people at black rock and

pemco and fidelity

that have more money than god will say

okay well it's safe now we might as well

buy a hundred billion

right you know what i say to the crypto

anarchist is

why don't you just get along with the

institutions and the corporations for

now hold your nose and when you've made

billions of dollars or tens of billions

take all your money buy an island start

your own country and do it your way

just take but take the money first right

like because there'll be

time to do it your you could have an

island with no taxes and

and no and all privacy you do it exactly

how you want it but wouldn't you be

better

i mean to get the hundred billion

dollars first

and then start the country then to have

your privacy

and then have no regulation and then and

your bitcoin is worth like 42 dollars

right it's like it's it's not that i

don't believe

i look i believe the ethos i'm a

libertarian i'm all in favor of all of

these

all of these uh you know individual

sovereignty

and and the like i just i think there's

a certain order to go about these things

and the first order is make the monetary

network successful

yeah and then after that figure out what

you're going to do

and don't hate on square and paypal

because they put some rails

on on some part of the network it's like

it's still going to benefit you

as the hodler yeah right i mean

grayscale is benefiting every hodler

even though

you know that's anathema you know it's

not your keys it's not your coin but

arguably grayscale is doing more for the

bitcoin ecosystem than anybody because

they're

channeling huge amounts of institutional

money into it

right to the benefit of everybody um

earlier you

were talking about these kind of like

pivotal moments where the paradigm

uh changes and um

so when i heard the news that

microstrategy had first

bought bitcoin the name was familiar to

me

and then i remembered how i knew it and

you may

um know what i'm going to ask you about

but you know i knew microstrategy as

the high-flying stock back in the

dot-com era

was a total tech darling and then it had

this epic downfall that i was

watching you know every day in the news

seeing the stock price plummet you know

after these accounting or regulatory

irregularities were revealed actually by

forbes which is

um my former employer but at the time i

was following this i was working the

wall street journal

and so i'll just recap for

the audience it appears microstrategy

and you can feel free to correct

you know anything was booking revenue

from

deals that had just been inked uh but

booking that revenue on its quarterly

earnings to show a profit

or sometimes at least the sec said even

leaving contracts unsigned until after

the quarter ended and then choosing

which ones to sign to meet

revenue targets and so after this was

revealed and microstrategy redid the

accounting it showed that the company

had actually been losing money for the

previous

three years and so this was just in the

news and

i mean you were also quite the character

like there was a profile of you in the

new yorker and you know i remember

uh yeah just uh you know you seemed like

this larger than life figure

and um at the end of that year

microstrategy and the sec reached a

settlement

after the sec accused you of fraud and

so frankly when i realized this was the

same

company and person that i'd followed all

the way back then i was i was really

amazed that also that you had stayed ceo

so i wondered what was your takeaway

from that experience

well you know what they say about

experience it's what you get when you

didn't get what you wanted

look that the restatement was a low

point uh

in the history of the company uh i'm not

proud of it i learned a lot from it

and uh i'm still here you know and uh

i i think that uh it's probably not that

much more

i care to say about it it was 20 odd

years ago

was there anything about that experience

that you think

or do you think there's any link between

what happened then and then your

decision now to go all in on bitcoin

uh no i don't think so um i i think that

at all points in time for the last 30

years the company has grown

by harnessing technology trends and we

wouldn't have uh

we wouldn't have become a public company

if we hadn't actually harnessed uh open

systems and relational databases and

that was a new trend and we wouldn't

have grown if we hadn't

tapped into the power of the internet

and that was a trend

uh i launched a bunch of companies along

the way like alarm.com

and that was like a home automation

trend alarm.com is a multi-billion

dollar publicly traded company today

uh like it was it was uh yeah it was

like

all the home automation things that

google

and amazon are doing but it was 20 years

early

we launched a company called angel which

is like surrey

and alexa it was another thing

at every single point right if you don't

embrace a new technology when the mobile

wave came along we launched a bunch of

new mobile software

and that was how we grew and uh

and so today there's a monetary network

and if you want to grow you have to tap

into the monetary network they're all

just different

waves of technology and paradigm shifts

if anything uh you know what i what i

learned from my experiences back in 2000

was

be very careful right be very careful

but

you know it was difficult times right um

99 of the companies that we competed

with are gone

99 of the ceos that i competed with

are gone it's a 99 mortality rate

and uh you know i learned a lot i did

some i did a financing at one point

didn't work out well the stock gyrated i

learned to be careful about that i

learned to be careful about many things

but

but you can't quit uh thinking

about the world and you and you can't um

you can't allow your past to keep you

from

charting the right future and uh

i'm i'm quite sure this is the right

thing to do

i think the rest of the world will in

time agree with me

but laura at the end of the day uh

public companies are required to take

risks

to grow the business right so so there

are thousands and thousands of public

companies

there are some companies that don't wish

to be software companies they think

that's too risky

there are some companies that won't be

real estate companies i think it's too

risky

right the responsibility of a company is

to

chart a strategy communicate it

transparently and then let people decide

whether or not they want to buy from the

company or they want to invest in the

company

and i think that we're very transparent

about what we're doing and

it may not be for everybody some people

may not like

the idea of bitcoin they may not believe

it's a digital monetary network

they may think that maybe gold's a

better investment or maybe the us dollar

is a better

investment right they all

are entitled to their opinion and

they'll invest in

companies and assets that uh are

suitable

for their outlook on the world

all right so in a moment we're going to

talk about kind of what happened after

you made the decision that you wanted to

allocate your capital to bitcoin but

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back to my conversation with michael

saylor so

you uh have your light bulb moment with

bitcoin

and you decide that this is what you

want to do or where you want to put the

company's

excess cash when you proposed it to

the board members and the company

officers what was the reaction

they were open-minded they wanted to get

educated

so first we started with an education

process

and it takes a while

to to understand it and after the

education process

there was a consensus building process a

lot of meetings a lot of discussions

and then we developed a set of projects

and we assigned some work for everybody

to do and the cfo had his work and

the general counsel had a different set

of tasks and we considered all of the

legal

regulatory and operational and

technical implications then we came back

and met again

then we formed a consensus that we were

going to pursue

in essence a dual strategy right the

first part of the strategy was

invest in bitcoin and the other part of

the strategy was do a tender offer

and then we executed that and so

we didn't know how that would that would

evolve

right i mean when you have if you have

publicly traded company it's not like

you could just meet with the three

shareholders you can't even meet with

the 10

you can't meet with shareholders because

they're changing every minute of the day

from 9 30 to 4. so what we did

was was we we announced the strategy

telegraphed it

allowed the market to digest it then we

started to execute the strategy

we had a 20-day tender period that was

20 days for the market to digest it

again

you're in a dance with the shareholders

right because they could have tender 250

million dollars or they could have

tendered

none or they could have tendered some at

different prices we don't know what will

happen

so after the tender offer was complete

then we had better information

and uh we knew we had 175 million

dollars of extra

cash we also had rotated the shareholder

base we had a different shareholder base

everyone that

thought this was an awful strategy had

either sold

during the tender period or sold into

the tender

and those that stayed in the stock and

presumably actually a lot of companies

bought into

the public float based upon the strategy

right so you have a different

shareholder base and you have a

different capital

balance sheet situation so at that point

we announced uh that we were we were

going to expand our

scope and we are going to make bitcoin

the primary treasury reserve asset

without a cap right and that's that's a

another

important development then we move

forward to acquire additional bitcoin

with a new uh with a new shareholder

base

and from that point forward things

evolved

right we don't know how that the stock

price evolves the bitcoin

market evolves new things new

developments present themselves and then

we act accordingly and rationally

yeah i mean in hindsight we can say your

timing was extraordinarily good

um but one thing that i was wondering is

so that moment where you decided to

not cap the amount you know like kind of

a traditional

way of looking at a portfolio is oh you

would

invest some percent like you know

one percent two percent five percent ten

percent in to

uh uh what they would call a speculative

asset like bitcoin

and so what was that moment where you

said okay it's not going to be like a

percentage it's just like everything

that we don't really need right at this

moment

um at the and i mean i know you kind of

already answered it but is it literally

just what you were saying about

how cash is depreciating or was there

any talk about

trying to diversify or at the end of the

tender offer

i mean when we finished the tender offer

and we knew the result of that we had a

board meeting we made that decision

and uh i i guess i would um

i would take issue with your

characterization that bitcoin is a

speculative asset

that's yeah i mean right that that's a

value judgment or that's

that's a that's a particular

characterization it's a speculative

asset if you think it is but

if you think that you're going to lose

75 percent of your purchasing power by

holding the dollar

and bitcoin is the soundest money in the

world

and is going up 200 a year every year on

average for a decade

a rational person could conclude that in

fact it's the least speculative thing

you could do

right so it just comes down to your

point of view

as for and and this this is a

fundamental

uh issue too for example if you were in

argentina

and you had all of your treasury and

argentine pesos

and i was on your board and you walked

in and said mike the argentine peso is

10 pesos to the dollar but i think it's

going to slide to 20 pesos to the dollar

right and i think perhaps we should uh

take our pesos and convert them into

dollars

before that happens or convert them into

something else

is that speculation i mean is that are

you risking the company's balance sheet

and then if you came if i said no just

do half and you said

but we're gonna lose the rest

right i mean is it is it prudent

and risk adverse to only do half what if

i told you the peso was going to go from

one peso to the dollar

to 140 pesos to the dollar which is what

happened

okay that's what happened are you gonna

sit and debate

with how would you feel if i'm on your

board and i say to you well laura

you know i really don't think it's safe

for you to convert half of your

or 75 of your balance sheet to dollars i

really think that's unsafe

and you say but you know we're going to

lose 99 of our wealth of our shareholder

value

i don't know it's a speculative well and

now you're going to say well the

dollar's not speculative

well it kind of is speculative because

i've had a company in argentina

and let me tell you what happened when i

did exactly that i converted the pesos

to dollars and the government passed the

law converting the dollars back into

pesos devalued them ten to one i lost

all my money

right okay so it was speculative to

convert pesos to

dollars right so any decision you make

with the treasury has some risk in

hindsight

the least risky thing i could have done

was convert the money to bitcoin

if i had actually converted the pesos to

bitcoin

and not converted the pesos to dollars

right then i actually would have kept

the value and

we could go on to other assets right

maybe i should have bought gold with it

or bought

forest land with it or something but but

um this idea that it's a speculation is

is based upon i don't know some

it's some premise that people have in

their head they think that it's

it's therefore risky but if something's

going up 200

a year on average for 12 years in a row

at what point do you conclude that it's

no longer riskier to hold it than

to not hold it yeah i feel like you're

like

um one of the first people

in the hyper bitcoinization wave where

you know you

think in bitcoin it's like andreas or

like

other you know i've had olof carlson we

the

founder and ceo of pollington capital he

used to

just do all his money in bitcoin as well

um so one thing i was curious about so

when you went to buy the bitcoin what

were the most difficult points in the

buying process

you know what parts of the bitcoin

industry do you think could need to

kind of advance further to serve

corporate investors well

the two challenges that uh any

institution

or a company has when they're buying

bitcoin or

who do i trade with and then where do i

store

and that's somewhat related to the other

decision you have to make which is am i

going to buy the underlying asset

and take custody of it or hold custody

of bitcoin itself

or am i going to buy into a fund

i guess do i buy the bitcoin on exchange

or do i buy grayscale

or or an equivalent as a fund where i

have the economic interest but in fact

the fund manager

has responsibility for trading and

custody

so um i there are different pros and

cons

with regard to those decisions and

different companies will make different

decisions based upon

their own circumstances i think you just

have to find the institutional grade

funds

or custodians and exchanges

we're actually hosting a bitcoin for

corporations conference and we're going

to have 10

of those institutional grade vendors

there and i'll be speaking

you know either with the ceos or with

their heads of institutional sales

and the simple question is what do you

offer for institutions

what's the customer journey what kind of