Discussion On The Rise Of Bitcoin Treasury Companies

Join by strategy chairman Michael Sailor. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. A lot of announcements this week focus on corporate Bitcoin

Treasuries you've got

GameStop announcing a half a billion dollar position Trump media looking to build a two and a half billion dollar stake

What do you make of this new trend that we're seeing and are they doing it right?

No force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come and

Maybe the most pleasant surprise over the past few months

Has been the explosion of

Energy and enthusiasm around Bitcoin treasury companies

The Trump media announcement came out of blue. I didn't you know know that was coming

But that was an incredible courageous aggressive and intelligent move on their part

You know the Nakamoto announcement was a pleasant surprise. I remember speaking with David saying, you know

You're doing these conferences a lot of Bitcoin

He said, you know, you know, you got to point there and I was just very very pleasantly surprised that he went and did it

I think

Also soft bank tether and cancer investing in that 21 announcement is great because it brought it brought a huge amount of capital from soft bank into the Bitcoin market

You know, it's like bringing

Massa son and into the ecosystem is good. I think it's great to have tether supporting a US listed company

Meta Planet was a $10 million company and a few months ago is a billion dollar company and in the last week or two

It's been flirting with a four or five billion dollar company

Most successful stock in the stock market

You know the blockchain group in France has exploded out of the blocks and and they're just growing incredibly fast

And then everywhere I go at this conference

Someone says you know, I'm working on a Bitcoin treasury company in Hong Kong. I'm doing this thing in Korea

I've got this thing I'm working on in Abu Dhabi. We're going to do this in the Middle East

You know, we've got this in the UK. We're ready to launch one in Canada. We're launching one in Norway

You know, we're doing this in Germany, you know, and I just think it's awesome. It's great for Bitcoin

Every one of those companies Brazil. There's a there's an explosion of interest right now

Every one of those companies is bringing Bitcoin to another global capital market

They're solving the compliance issues the capital markets issues the registrations issues

They solve the political issues. They're all ambassadors for Bitcoin planting the orange flag

Everywhere on earth and in invariably it starts with this is the venture and then it becomes wow

This is a very successful venture. I never made this much money and then it becomes so tell me about the Bitcoin thing again

How did I make that money and then pretty soon you have an entirely new generation of

Capitalists that have discovered Bitcoin is digital capital and maybe the most explosive idea of the era

Why do you think that Wall Street hasn't responded as positively to the

announcements from Trump media and GameStop the GameStop shares are gone 17% since they made the announcement Trump media shares down

22% seems to be pretty much the exact opposite reaction that strategy investors have had well you know when

GameStop announced that they were going to consider a Bitcoin strategy. They're stuck jump 50% and their volume

10x and then on the strength of that they went to the market and they did a

$1.5 billion dollar convertible preferred stock. Sorry a convertible bond which was extraordinarily successful

so

They they had raised 1.5 billion

Maybe the market wanted them to buy more Bitcoin

And so you know maybe that's it. I think with Trump media

They did a very big capital race, but a large component that was a convertible bond

I think it's important to note be sophisticated about this when you're selling a convertible bond

70% of the face value of the bond is sold short as equity

So the convertible arbitrage years are always arming the equity against the bond and in the you know

In the short term you're going to see if a company says I'm doing a billion dollar secondary stock issue

The stocks are to trade down all of these things are will be short term dynamics over the long term

Bitcoin on the balance sheet has proven to be extraordinarily popular

driving increase in liquidity of the meta planets of the similars

It will you know it's driven the increase in liquidity of GameStop

It will drive an increase and a benefit to the rest it might take you know three months six months

sometimes, you know

perhaps even a year

But you know the strategy is very sound and all of these companies will benefit from it and you pioneered this strategy

I mean your balance sheet is worth north of 62 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin

Is there a limit to how many Bitcoin you can own or do you have a fixed number in mind?

No, we'll keep buying Bitcoin

We expect the price of Bitcoin will keep going up. We think it will get exponentially harder to buy Bitcoin

But we will work exponentially more efficiently to buy Bitcoin

You know used to be we thought raising 200 million was challenge and then raising two billion was a challenge

And then in the fourth quarter we announced we're gonna raise 21 billion and so we're getting better

Bitcoin is ten times higher and ten times more valuable than when we started on this journey

And the entire ecosystem is growing

But I think our strategy is very simple. It's that issue credit instruments like preferred stocks

That offer a yield in dollars or issues some portion of Bitcoin upside with some downside protection

That will create leverage for our common equity and then people will buy the equity or the derivatives of the equity of the options

The equity because they want higher of all higher leverage Bitcoin and people will buy the preferred stocks because they want lower volatility

lower risk lower leverage guaranteed returns and we will straddle that you know and there's no reason that

Can't just continue to scale as the ecosystem scales now the executive order that created a strategic Bitcoin reserve

Really put the task of looking at a budget neutral way to acquire Bitcoin into into the future into the hands of both treasury and

Commerce are you either advising

Members of the White House cabinet or do you have ideas about how they might do that?

I think it's an incredible cabinet a lot of Bitcoin believers in the cabinet

And there's a lot of good ideas circulating in the industry the Bitcoin policy in stupe created a bunch of them

Even the cabinet members have mentioned quite a number of them

It's above my pay grade to decide what the US government will do and when they will do it

But I do think there is an extraordinary

Opportunity for the United States if I was

Advising the United States I would say you know all the capital in the world is gonna flow into cyber space into the Bitcoin network

It's in the best interest of the United States to own as much of it

They can't as they can before everybody else in the world realizes what's happening

I do wonder whether the

Underlying thesis of Bitcoin has fundamentally changed it used to be that you don't want it to be tied to anyone government or

Any one central bank and now we're seeing the US wanting

Expressing this desire to become the crypto capital of the United States of the world to have all mining centralized in the United States

Does that disrupt what Bitcoin was meant to be if you have all these governments now looking to stockpile the token?

I think Bitcoin is a manifestation of very healthy competition

So as the US expresses support in Bitcoin we have the Pakistanis announcing a strategic Bitcoin reserve that

Inspires the Emirates it inspires the Middle Easterners to also begin to accumulate in Bitcoin it accelerates Bitcoin adoption in Brazil

It accelerates adoption in in Mexico. It accelerates the moves of corporations Eric Adams standing up on stage and

announcing his intent to issue BitBonds for New York City

That's going to inspire Miami and inspire LA and inspire San Francisco

It's you know, so it's healthy competition

There's there's more than enough to go around the network is very anti-fragile and

There's a balance of power here that's created because the more actors that come into the ecosystem

The more diverse the more distributed the protocol is the more

Incorruptible it becomes the more robust it becomes and so that means more trustworthy

Becomes to larger economic actors who otherwise would be afraid to put all of their economic weight on the network

Now the president's meme token has attracted a lot of controversy

Many people argue that it's undermined a lot of progress on capital Hill with respect to some of those crypto bills and are now being held up

With Senate Democrats specifically citing that meme token. What do you make of this dynamic?

I think

The best future for the crypto economy for the crypto industry and and what the US should do if they want to create a

$100 trillion digital asset industry is

Inlaw they should define for new asset classes the digital commodity

That's what Bitcoin is an asset without an issuer. There's only going to be it, you know one king commodity

There might be half a dozen over the next decade the digital currency that would be a stablecoin back one for one with

US currency equivalents in a regulated bank

like circle

Then the digital security that would be a tokenized stock or bond circulating 24 7 365 at the speed of light everywhere in the world like

Digital Apple stock or tokenized, you know SPY

And then the final would be a digital token a digital token would be a

tokenized fan club a tokenized ticket a tokenized

membership of some sort and there's 40 million small businesses in this country and if you want to issue a token

You should be able to issue a token in four hours

And there ought to be an issuer and you ought to say what the token does it ought to have some

Digital utility or real-world utility, but it should stop short of offering security or financial utility

It shouldn't give you liquidation preferences to a going concern

It shouldn't give you guaranteed cash flows for 30 years like a bond

It ought to be Joe Rogan token or Katy Perry token and if Katy Perry wants to offer a token that offers her VIP fans

They go to book tickets 48 hours in advance to her concert tour

They buy it it would have utility it wouldn't be a security and and

If she didn't go on concert for the rest of her life the token would crash out of her concerts were great

The token would fly and when you look at Trump coin

It's a mean coin that means a token that has no utility

How many people can sell a token with no utility?

Only a handful of people will do it, but some people can sell a mean coin and and if they talk about it

You know the Kardashians want to talk about it or if someone Joe Rogan wants to sell something maybe people will buy it

I happen to believe

That there's a place for all four of those assets

I think that the the role of a token is to give access to the capital markets to 40 million small businesses that are locked out of the capital markets

But I also think that tokens would allow you to create innovative new business models

And if Joe Rogan said I'm gonna sell Joe Rogan token and I'm gonna give you content that only you can access if you buy the token

If it's a good product and if he wants to monetize it like that

As long as he's not lying cheating or stealing his customer, he'll be fine

And then I think

It's pretty clear that tokens ought to be subject to consumer protection law

If you set up an eBay account and then you sell 47,000 tickets and then don't deliver any

That's fraud and likewise if if you commit fraud on a token then you ought to be subject to consumer fraud wire fraud

And I think the issuers should be liable for the damage they do civilly and criminally

But you know, that's no different than driving a car across the city

You don't need to wait four years. It's been 40 million dollars on SEC lawyers to drive your car across the city

Everybody ought to have freedom to do business and so

Right now we're in this intermediate period where

There is no market structure act there is not in law the definition of a digital currency digital token digital security

digital commodity

If we want the world if we want the industry to grow by a factor of a hundred or a thousand if we want to export

You want to export the currency of the United States of the world you need digital currency

If you want to export the securities of the capital market the Apple stock the ETFs the bonds to the world

Need digital securities if you want to export all of the ideas and raise capital for all the small mid-sized businesses

You need digital tokens and if you want to export the values of the United States which are sovereignty trust sound money freedom

You want to export Bitcoin Bitcoin is American values. So you're going to export that digital commodity

I think it's very clear to me

There's a lot of work. We need to do on capital Hale to put that into law if we put it into law

Then these debates and this anxiety will go away

I think the most important thing I say McKenzie is

It's not enough to write a thousand pages of law that the lawyers think you can litigate for 20 years

You have to define the token so that one billion people in five seconds say oh, that's a token Joe Rogan token

I get it and you have to define the currency so people say oh, that's a digital currency that's backed by dollars

I get it if a billion people don't understand what I just said in five seconds

It won't work and once they understand it

They'll be like oh, there's a meme coin anybody can sell it. It's just a token. It's not a security. It's not a commodity

It's not a currency

You know, it's a token and outside of classification

Do you think it's a good idea to add an amendment where you would bar senior officials including the president from benefiting either directly or indirectly

From stablecoin-related ventures or token-related ventures. Do you think it's good to introduce that kind of

Impose I think the important point to note is Bitcoin is a commodity and asset without an issuer

And that means that everybody in government

Whether you're the president or a senator or congressperson they can own a bar of gold

They can own a house they can have a chicken they can have farmland they can have timber soybeans a barrel of oil

And they can have some Bitcoin that's just property in a commodity

I think that issuers should have responsibilities the issuers that issue currencies should be regulated by the by the banking regulators and FDIC

Because they're creating currencies

The issuers of security should be regulated by the SEC

Because if you're going to print a hundred billion dollars of Apple stock you should have to have the Apple stock and you should have that liability

Issuers of tokens should be responsible for for any

Damage they do through fraud if you lie about what you've done right if if you're untruthful then you should be

liable under a consumer protection laws and any other applicable law and I would say that should be applied to anybody

Now since January you've seen the SEC the OCC the FDIC the Fed all rolled back

Guidance that stood in the way of crypto adoption here in the US you've been here since monday

We've seen the White House to send on Las Vegas everyone from White House crypto and ais are David sacks to the vice president

What kind of conversations are you having with them about what you want to see next?

I think um

What's really important going forward is for the government to move in such a way that they make clear that Bitcoin is a legitimate

asset it is digital gold it is a digital commodity and they need to educate the world

That this is not a security it is not a token it is not a collectible it is not a currency

It is a digital commodity because we got to two trillion dollars in market cap

Without the support of the banking system without the support of the insurance companies without the support of the credit rating agencies

Without the support of mainstream media with most of the power structure of the world, you know

Looking a scance at this

So I think that for Bitcoin to go the next level and provide the prosperity that it can provide to the US and to the world

In the world needs to be educated and then all of these traditional 20th century financial structures

They need to embrace and at least treat this as a neutral asset

This week for example the Department of Labor rollback guidance discouraging people from allowing

Uh, you know allowing employees to put Bitcoin in a in a retirement plan

Right and and for a while we were worried we were going to be investigated by the Department of Labor

If we offer our own employees the ability to elect to buy Bitcoin

So I think there's been a lot of discrimination

On the part of all of the 20th century traditional finance complex

And I think the government has a leadership role uh to bring them into the 21st century

Beyond that

In the entire digital asset space as I said the big three items is the government needs to uh memorialize in law

Digital currencies digital securities and digital tokens that will go a long way toward alleviating the debate the anxiety the confrontation

and uh

And the con in all and the conflict it will also accelerate

The investment and the development of all of these digital assets by a factor of 10 to 100

And the US will emerge as the world's digital banker

The world's digital capital market the world's digital innovator right and and that'll be good for America for the American people and ultimately

The world once these things too

They're frozen

Everybody else in the world is paralyzed and they're frozen they can't innovate

Until

Washington DC defines tokens currencies and commodities and securities and then every one of our allies will all

Lurch forward and you will see an extraordinary Cambrian explosion of digital innovation

Which will take the United States and the world in general into the 21st century

And might well I've been covering this event for the last five years last five consecutive years

You and I have spoken on the sideline of this event and it's really evolved from being very Bitcoin centric to I mean this week

We had quite a few announcements around stable coins

How do you gauge this convergence of Bitcoin with other corners of the crypto ecosystem?

Do you think that we're moving in the right direction here?

I think that the industry was somewhat fragmented and the Bitcoin community was

Was bifurcated from the crypto community and I think that what's happened over the past

Six months maybe 12 months you could you could date it from November 5

Has been an extraordinary

extraordinary

Coming together of the entire crypto industry

The crypto innovators the stable coin industry the Bitcoin industry the traditional finance here is a wall street

You know and politicians they've all come together and converge with a common vision and

And I think

What people are realizing now is that what's best for the world and what's best for the industry is

A commodity Bitcoin and the and the use cases store of value long-term capital

A currency the digital dollar the use cases medium of exchange

Right for everybody on earth

Then you've got the security the use case is to create capital markets innovation and velocity

So you know how do yourself custody Apple stock in India on Sunday afternoon right and move it to Singapore

Right and then finally digital tokens

And the use cases to raise capital and to create compelling new products

I think two years ago. I thought there was just

The industry consisted of well-awaited Bitcoin gradually live and I hate everything else

That was the status quo a year and a half ago and I think we have moved into a much more enlightened

Political climate where now people are starting to have calm

measured constructive discussions

Like I can see like I can see why people in Turkey or Argentina might want dollars in their wallet

And if you're a Bitcoin maxi you don't have to be angry at them for wanting dollars

And maybe there's a use of that and then if you're a dollar person

You're like I can see how Bitcoin could be a savings account for people that actually have enough dollars

And if you're a small mid-sized business and there's 400 million of them

You know they're starting to see like well, maybe there's a path where I can issue a token and get the money and use the money to build my business

I shouldn't have to be ashamed or embarrassed about the fact that I need to raise capital to grow my business

There's nothing nothing to be embarrassed about there

But two years ago

The status was well if you're not a commodity we're putting you in jail or shutting you down

And so people in the crypto industry had to go through this kabuki dance this theater

Well, I'm gonna be a commodity because I'm either a commodity or I'm dead

Well, the truth of the matter is they didn't want to be a commodity

They didn't want to be the next Bitcoin

They wanted to raise money to grow their business in an ethically sound transparent way

But there was no regulatory path to do it

Now people are starting to see that well, maybe there's an ethical path

To sell a token

I don't have to hate Bitcoin anymore and the Bitcoiners think well, you know now we can live and be part of the ecosystem

Maybe I don't hate the stablecoin people or hate the crypto token people or hate the crypto exchanges

And collectively the entire industry I think understands

They're all better off and together. We're all stronger together

If the country is going to overcome its challenges

And if the industry is going to overcome its challenges

We're going to do it by creating hundreds of trillions of dollars of value

And the big unlock here is not technology

The big unlock is a regulatory breakthrough which is

Define a digital token of digital security and a digital currency

The industry will grow by a factor of 100

You know

Who knows what to 100 trillion or more Bitcoin will march into the hundreds of trillions

The nation will benefit the industry will benefit

The world will benefit that's our path forward

Michael, thank you. That's Michael Seller strategy chairman joining us here at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas