Saylor explains how MicroStrategy stock has fared since adopting the Bitcoin standard
On Thursday (Oct. 27), Michael Saylor, co-founder and executive chairman of software company MicroStrategy Inc. (NASDAQ: MSTR ), talked about how the company’s stock has performed compared to major tech stocks since the firm adopted the Bitcoin standard.
It’s worth remembering that on August 11, 2020, MicroStrategy announced via a press release that it had “purchased 21,454 bitcoins for a total purchase price of $250 million” to use as a “primary treasury reserve asset.”
Saylor said at the time:
“Our decision to invest in Bitcoin at this time was driven in part by a confluence of macro factors affecting the economic and business landscape that we believe create long-term risks to our financial program – risks that should be proactively managed.“
Since then, MicroStrategy has continued to accumulate Bitcoin and its former CEO has become one of Bitcoin’s most vocal advocates. MicroStrategy’s latest $BTC purchase, which Saylor tweeted about on September 20, 2022, means the firm now holds around 130,000 bitcoins, which were “acquired for ~$3.98 billion at an average price of ~$30,639 per bitcoin.”
Anyway, yesterday (October 27) Saylor took to Twitter to point out that since MicroStrategy started putting Bitcoin on its balance sheet on August 11, 2020, the price of MicroStrategy stock, i.e. MSTR, is up 121%, which is pretty impressive when you consider that the best performing large tech stock i.e. AAPL is only up 30% and the worst performing tech stock i.e. META is down 62% since that date.
On September 4, 2022, CoinDesk reported that Saylor had spoken (via video call) on Saturday (September 3) to an audience at the Baltic Honeybadger conference in Riga, Latvia, and had this to say about what his firm does. Lightning Network:
“MicroStrategy has some R&D projects going on right now where we’re working on enterprise applications for Lightning: Enterprise Lightning Wallet, Enterprise Lightning Servers, Enterprise Authentication.“
He also explained why he believes Lightning has a great future:
“The advantage of Lightning is not only that you can scale up bitcoin for billions of people, or get the transaction costs to almost nothing, but also the ethos of bitcoin is to tread very carefully and not move quickly on the base layer without the universal consensus, but in Lightning you can you move much more aggressively developing functionality and taking more risks with the applications than you can with the underlying bitcoin layer.“
Late last month, MicroStrategy began looking for a Lightning software engineer to help them “build a Lightning Network-based SaaS platform, which provides businesses with innovative solutions to cybersecurity challenges and enables new eCommerce use cases.”
