All news is rigorously fact-checked and reviewed by leading blockchain experts and seasoned industry insiders.
- Michael Saylor described Bitcoin as property in cyberspace, capital for the digital era, and a reimagined version of gold.
- He believes Bitcoin-backed lending could open new doors, with Strategy setting the standard for corporate adoption.
Bitcoin (BTC) was created in 2009 by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, but it wasn’t until 2020 that the corporate space began to take it seriously, largely thanks to MicroStrategy, now rebranded as Strategy.
The company launched its Bitcoin treasury at a time when few dared to put digital assets on their balance sheets, and today it’s cited as the blueprint for how financial institutions around the world could embrace BTC.
Today, more than 120 entities across 29 countries collectively hold over 1.5 million BTC, worth about $176 billion, giving Bitcoin a Treasury dominance of 7.22%. Strategy has added another 7,574 BTC in just the past month, pushing its total stash to 640,031 BTC.
In a recent conversation with Bitcoin Magazine, Strategy co-founder Michael Saylor sat down with the corporation’s Managing Director, George Mekhail, to unpack what Bitcoin really means. To Saylor, it’s “digital property, digital capital, or digital gold.” In its deepest sense, he says, Bitcoin is “digital energy.”
It’s a way of moving value, energy across time and space at the speed of light. For Saylor, that makes Bitcoin a life-affirming force for eight billion people and 400 million companies worldwide.
“When I say Bitcoin is hope, I mean Bitcoin is digital energy,” Saylor explained.
If you want to send energy instantly, halfway across the globe, to solve a problem or save a life, you’ll need digital energy. That’s what Bitcoin represents, the next paradigm shift, the next evolution in the story of energy.
I think the endgame is we accumulate a trillion dollars worth of bitcoin and then we grow it 20, 30% a year. The endgame is to get to a trillion dollars of collateral growing 30% a year.
This is a projection he ties to the underlying appreciation dynamics of BTC, which, over time, has shown a reliable annualized growth rate near 21%.
Bitcoin-Backed Credit
For the first time, the world has “digital capital”, a universally recognized form of digital gold. And if Bitcoin is digital capital, then naturally it can serve as the basis for a new kind of credit. He paints the picture by comparing it to gold banking centuries ago: If you held a billion dollars’ worth of gold, you could issue gold-backed notes, first $100 million, then $500 million, then even more. Over time, that practice resulted in the entire credit system.
Now, Bitcoin offers the same model. A billion dollars in Bitcoin could support a billion dollars of Bitcoin-backed credit, one-to-one, without the fragility of mortgages, commercial real estate, corporate cash flows, or fiat promises.
Saylor argues this has the power to displace legacy credit markets, which today total in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. Instead of being tied to assets that depreciate, decay, or rely on governments’ ability to print money, credit could be anchored to the hardest asset on earth.
That’s why he believes Bitcoin treasury companies like Strategy, Metaplanet, or Mara Holdings have such a compelling business model: accumulate digital capital, then build credit instruments on top of it. These could take many forms, such as bonds, convertible bonds, preferred shares, or even new hybrid financial instruments.
Saylor explained his vision using Brazil as an example: he suggested launching a company called Orange Bitcoin (OBTC), backed entirely by Bitcoin, which has historically grown around 55% annually in dollar terms. Such a company would instantly outpace traditional Brazilian equities, making its stock highly valuable.
Once it begins issuing credit instruments, OBTC would also compete directly with existing credit markets.
At the May 6 Bitcoin for Corporations Conference, Michael Saylor laid out his vision for Bitcoin’s future, predicting it could grow from a $2 trillion asset today into a $280 trillion powerhouse within the next two decades.
