MicroStrategy Has Nothing on Satoshi

November 30, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

• Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping down and will be replaced by CTO Parag Agrawal.

• Digital asset funds experienced a $306 million inflow for the week ending November 26.

• Hivemind Captial Partners, a VC fund headed by a former Citi exec, announced a $1.5 billion fund to invest in blockchain and digital asset ecosystems.

• The Federal Reserve Bank of New York launched a new research wing to test fintech technology, such as CBDCs.

• Invesco, an investment firm with $1.3 trillion in AUM, has partnered with CoinShares and will release a European ETP backed by physical BTC. 

• Galaxy Digital is selling $500 million in exchangeable senior notes to raise money to accelerate growth initiatives across its business lines.

• Kelly Strategic Management filed with the SEC for an ether futures ETF.

• Artist Damien Hirst airdropped a collection of 10,000 NFTs depicting the cover art he created for Drake’s latest album.

• The Bank of Israel is accelerating its research on issuing a digital shekel; Tanzania plans to launch a CBDC.

• Kraken will list SHIB on November 30th.

• Budweiser released a collection of 1,936 Ethereum NFTs yesterday.

• Binance has resumed Dogecoin withdrawals after a 17-day delay.

• AMC and Sony partnered to drop a line of NFTs as rewards for the advance purchase of tickets to the upcoming Spider-Man “Now Way Home” movie.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

MicroStrategy Stacks More Sats

The software company MicroStrategy announced the purchase of 7,002 Bitcoin for roughly $414.4 million in cash at an average price of $59,187.

With its latest purchase, MicroStrategy holds 121,044 bitcoins, or about .57% of the entire supply of Bitcoin. The firm’s Bitcoin was acquired at an aggregate price of $3.57 billion — leaving MicroStrategy with an average BTC purchase price of just under $30,000. At current prices, MicroStrategy has nearly doubled its total investment in BTC.

To put that number in perspective…

• If MicroStrategy were to hold all 121,044 bitcoins in a single wallet, it would be the third-largest BTC holder in existence, according to data from BitInfoCharts.
• MicroStrategy holds almost three times the amount of Bitcoin as Tesla, which owns 42,902 bitcoins and is the second-largest public holder of BTC, according to data from Buy Bitcoin Worldwide.

Notably, while MicroStrategy is a whale, its Bitcoin holdings still pale in comparison to Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Even after investing over $3 billion into Bitcoin, MicroStrategy barely holds 1/10th the amount of Bitcoin commonly associatedwith Satoshi, who likely mined roughy 1 million bitcoins back in the early days of the protocol.

While the software firm is up at least $3 billion on its Bitcoin investment, the question still looms about what would happen if the price of bitcoin crashes in the future — as MicroStrategy’s huge BTC bet is mostly fueled by purchases backed by $2 billion in loans. As reported by The Block, some observers speculate that if BTC were to plunge, as it is known to do every once in a while, MicroStrategy could struggle to repay its debt.

Recommended Reads

• I wrote two articles on what gives bitcoin and ETH value — great to share with beginners:

• Variant Fund’s Cooper Turley on scaling DAOs:

• Galaxy Digital on the cost to mine a single Bitcoin:

On The Pod…

Will Solana Be the Execution Layer and Ethereum the Settlement Layer?

On Unchained, two co-founders of Solana Labs, Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, dive deeply into the Solana ecosystem, discussing everything from the price of SOL to the Solana network outage to the competition between Ethereum and Solana. Show highlights:

• • why Raj thinks SOL’s market cap grew from $86 million to $68 billion in less than a year
  • Anatoly’s and Raj’s background and how they found themselves working together to build Solana
  • why Anatoly thinks Solana will be a general-purpose blockchain rather than specializing in gaming or high frequency trading
  • Anatoly’s goal to make Solana the first billion-user blockchain
  • why Raj thinks NFTs on Solana have been so popular
  • why, in the opinion of Raj and Anatoly, Solana’s purpose has shifted away from high-frequency trading
  • how NFTs could replace ads
  • why “everything is DeFi”
  • how Solana Labs plans to allocate the recent $314 million funding round it raised
  • what lessons Anatoly learned from the 18-hour September network outage
  • technically speaking, what happened to cause Solana’s network outage
  • why Anatoly believes that outages, at this stage, aren’t necessarily a bad thing
  • whether “trading mercenaries” dominated at Solana Breakpoint
  • why developers are interested in building on Solana
  • how Solana and Ethereum compare as execution and settlement layers
  • why Raj doesn’t like framing competition between Solana and Ethereum as a fight
  • how Anatoly views the competition between Ethereum and Solana
  • whether the arrival of Neon Labs, which is bringing EVM to Solana, could lead to developers leaving Ethereum
  • how NFTs and Phantom wallets are bringing in new users for Solana
  • whether Raj and Anatoly would roll back Solana if something like Ethereum’s DAO hack were to occur
  • why Solana has the competitive advantage in throughput, according to Anatoly
  • what would happen if FTX cofounder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried gave up on Solana
  • their predictions for Solana five years from now

Book Update

You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians