“The institutions are coming.”
Anyone who has been in the Bitcoin space for a significant period of time has heard a prominent figure in the space utter this phrase.
In August 2020, when MicroStrategyan American enterprise software company, announced that it would be buy bitcoins To add to his treasure, many thought it was the beginning of institutional collapse.
But that wasn't the case.
Of course, Tesla bought Bitcoin the following year, only for throw away 75% a little after.
So from 2020 to 2023, MicroStrategy was an anomaly. During these years, the company – led by Bitcoin permabull Michael Saylor – remained the only major company on Earth to convert a notable portion of its cash flow into Bitcoin.
Saylor's vision to integrate MicroStrategy into the Bitcoin standard has not wavered, however.
Instead, he doubled down and continued to guide MicroStrategy as it put more bitcoin on its balance sheet. He also held a conference – MicroStrategy World: Bitcoin for Corporations – every year, starting the year after his company first purchased Bitcoin, to show other companies how to imitate MicroStrategy.
This year's edition of the conference, held May 1-2 in Las Vegas, Nevada, marked the beginning of a new era, according to Saylor, one in which the time has come to institutions to follow MicroStrategy's lead.
The era of Bitcoin for institutions and businesses has begun
In Saylor's keynote presentation on the second day of the conference titled “There Is No Second Best,” he called the years 2020-2023 the “roaring twenties” in the Bitcoin space.
He explained that these years were part of a period of “crypto chaos,” a period from which Bitcoin became the dominant and most trusted crypto asset.
What followed the Roaring Twenties, Saylor said, were the years in which institutions and businesses adopted Bitcoin, and he told Bitcoin Magazine in a X spaces On April 30, the day before the conference began, he believed that this new era began in January 2024, when 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs were launched in the United States.
Let's not just take Saylor's word that a new day has dawned. Consider what Hunter Horsley, CEO of Bitwiseone of 11 financial institutions that launched a spot Bitcoin ETF in the United States, has had its say on institutional interest in Bitcoin.
“Bitcoin ETFs have really brought Bitcoin into the realm of possibility for many traditional financial institutions,” Horsley said during a panel during the second day of the conference.
“Many traditional and reputable companies have started to engage with bitcoin in ways they never have before, but very few of them are talking about it. If you simply scroll through your LinkedIn or read press releases, you would think nothing has changed from last year, but, for now, most – or many – prefer to keep it that way. not public,” he added.
JUST IN: $3.5 billion, says Bitwise CEO "Many traditional and reputed companies have started to engage with #Bitcoin in a way never seen before, yet so few people talk about it."
"Banks contact us" 👀 pic.twitter.com/h0jjhrzZQ6
– Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) May 2, 2024
Alexander Leishman, CEO and CTO, Bitcoin Exchange Riveralso pointed out in his presentation that while buying bitcoin has traditionally been a retail investor-driven phenomenon, more and more companies are also starting to dip their toes in the bitcoin waters.
In one of his slides, Leishman pointed out that the percentages of companies and funds/ETFs holding bitcoin may not seem high, but they are larger than they have been in previous years.
“We have companies, funds, ETFs and governments, these big institutions, these blue and black bars. These bars went from basically nothing to what they are today, but they continue to grow,” Leishman said.
“Retail is not really the driving force behind the recent rise in Bitcoin price. Consumer interest in bitcoin is far from having reached its all-time high. So what's driving this price increase? We believe that institutions are an important factor,” he added.
According to David Marcus, CEO of Bright sparkIn the near future, institutions will not only look to keep bitcoin on their balance sheet or offer it to their clients, but they will also start using it for payments.
Lightspark uses Lightning to connect businesses around the world
To wrap up the first day of the conference, Saylor sat down with Marcus, a former PayPal executive and former head of Facebook's abandoned cryptocurrency project Libra, to discuss how the Lightning Network will connect the world's businesses entire.
Lightspark made headlines the day before the conference started, announcing that Coinbase would use Lightspark to integrate Lightning for its US users.
According to Marcus, Coinbase was just the first of many companies that would soon harness the power of Lightning.
“In a world where hundreds of millions or even billions of people will have an address to get money that can be settled in real time in the currency of their choice, you can imagine all kinds of new applications (for businesses) Marcus said of companies using Lightning to not only send sats, but also digitized versions of fiat currencies.
"Now is the time to enable fast and cheap real-time movement of Bitcoin and other assets (on Lightning)."
-David Marcus, CEO, LightSpark @lightspark#BitcoinforBusiness– MicroStrategy (@MicroStrategy) May 1, 2024
“Getting money to end points is part of it. New forms of payment for merchants that would allow them to reach new audiences or new customer bases that they could not reach (previously). The ability to create entirely new business models to enable people to actually contribute to whatever you're building, wherever they are in the world,” he added.
“It will have an impact on the world that will be as important as the Internet itself was in its day for communications.”
Marcus also touched on the fact that businesses are more multinational in nature than individual Bitcoin users and will benefit greatly from moving value across the world in real time via Lightning.
It was hard not to be bullish on Bitcoin and Lightning after listening to Marcus and Saylor converse.
It was also hard not to be bullish on Bitcoin, not only as a store of value and medium of exchange, but also as a platform of trust after Cezary Raczko, executive vice president of engineering at MicroStrategy, has revealed its plans for MicroStrategy Orange, a decentralized company. identity platform (DID) built on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Orange MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy Orange is an enterprise platform that allows organizations to use DID applications, built directly on top of the Bitcoin base layer.
This is the first technological innovation involving Bitcoin in which MicroStrategy has participated.
“The platform consists of three fundamental elements,” Raczko said. “At the heart of it is a hosted cloud service that allows you to issue these credentials to your users in your organization. It also allows you to deploy applications that run on MicroStrategy Orange. The Orange SDK allows you to integrate applications into your own services. And Orange applications will be prepackaged solutions that respond to specific digital identity challenges.
This news came as a pleasant surprise to many at the conference, as it illustrates that MicroStrategy wants to continue to lead the way in Bitcoin adoption – outside of its store of value use case – as we are entering this new era of businesses and institutions adopting Bitcoin. .
Standardize Bitcoin for Business
Conversations, both on and off the conference stage, revolved around Bitcoin's shift from a taboo entity to something that is becoming more normal, making it harder for businesses and institutions to ignore.
In conversations I've had with Bitcoin industry leaders like Becca Rubenfeld, COO of AnchorWatch; Sam Abbasi, founder and CEO of Hoseki; and Nathan McCauley, co-founder and CEO of Digital AnchorageI learned that businesses and institutions that once viewed Bitcoin as nothing more than a scam or a fad are now beginning to question how they can adopt it.
“It’s exciting to be at a stage of adoption where access to bitcoin is being expanded to businesses and their customers,” Rubenfeld told Bitcoin Magazine. “This event is particularly geared toward that, helping to focus the conversation on the benefits and challenges unique to this new set of Bitcoin owners.”
Although it has taken a while for businesses to adopt Bitcoin, it is clear that we are at the start of an era in which they are starting to see the value.
While businesses and institutions aren't necessarily ready to adopt a Bitcoin standard like MicroStrategy has done, it appears more are ready to gain exposure to the Bitcoin asset or start using Lightning for payments or applications that use the Bitcoin blockchain.
For this, we have Michael Saylor and the team at MicroStrategy to thank.