Though Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $103,000 last week and has since dipped to as low as $96,981 in the last 24 hours, U.S. interest in BTC, the cryptocurrency created by Satoshi Nakamoto, remains strong.
On Monday, MicroStrategy cofounder Michael Saylor announced that the software development firm not only sold an aggregate of 5,418,449 shares between Dec. 2 and Dec. 8 for roughly $2.1 billion but also picked up an additional 21,550 BTC ($2.1 billion).
According to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange, MicroStrategy’s recent purchase has an average acquisition price of $98,783 per token.
The price of BTC reached an all-time high of $103,679 on Dec. 5, before settling at $97,001 at press time, per CoinGecko. Bitcoin has added almost $600 billion to its market cap since the U.S. presidential election, rising roughly 44% from $1.3 trillion on Nov. 5 to $1.9 trillion at press time.
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MicroStrategy’s announcement comes on the same day that Riot Platforms proposed a private offering of $500 million of convertible senior notes, in which the net proceeds will be used to scoop up more bitcoins. Riot, a Bitcoin-driven infrastructure platform, has operations in Texas, Kentucky, and Colorado..
Meanwhile, at MicroSoft’s upcoming board meeting on Tuesday, shareholders will be voting on whether the firm should conduct an assessment of investing in BTC, a filing with the SEC shows.
Coinbase BTC Premium Points to U.S. Interest
The Coinbase BTC premium – the percent difference between the price of BTC on Coinbase Pro versus popular non-U.S. exchange Binance – has largely been positive since the Nov. 5 election that ended with Donald Trump becoming president-elect.
BTC’s price percent difference between Coinbase and Binance has been positive for 30 days out of the last 32, indicating higher buying pressure among U.S. investors in Coinbase than offshore, data from blockchain analytics firm CryptoQuant shows.
MicroStrategy, headquartered in Virginia, selected Coinbase as an execution partner four years ago, according to a 2020 Coinbase blog post written by Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase institutional.
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MicroStrategy’s Monday announcement makes it the fifth disclosure since the end of Oct as the firm has been acquiring BTC every week since Oct. 31, filings show (one, two, three, four, and five).
As of Sunday, MicroStrategy holds in total about 423,650 bitcoins worth about $42.6 billion at current prices, making the firm the largest corporate holder of BTC. As of the end of November, Riot holds 11,425 bitcoins, per a Dec. 3 announcement.