“The institutions are coming.”
This phrase is familiar to anyone who has been involved in Bitcoin for a significant amount of time.
The month of August 2020 is when MicroStrategyA business software provider based in the United States announced its intention to be acquired by purchasing bitcoin The institution stampede began when it added the funds to its Treasury.
The answer is no.
Sure, Tesla bought some bitcoin Only the next year will be able to dump 75% of it soon after.
MicroStrategy, then, was an exception from 2023 to 2020. During these years, the company — led by Bitcoin permabull Michael Saylor — remained the only major corporation on Earth to convert a notable portion of its treasury into bitcoin.
Saylor hasn’t changed his mind about getting MicroStrategy to a Bitcoin standard.
He instead has doubled-down and continues to guide MicroStrategy while it adds more bitcoin to its balance. He’s also hosted a conference — MicroStrategy World: Bitcoin for Corporations — every year starting the year after his company made its first bitcoin purchase as a means to show other companies how to emulate MicroStrategy.
This year’s edition of the conference — held on May 1 and 2 in Las Vegas, NV — marked the beginning of a new era, according to Saylor, an era in which the time has come for institutions to follow MicroStrategy’s lead.
Bitcoin’s Age for Institutions and Corporations has Begun
Saylor’s presentation at the Conference on Day Two entitled “There Is No Second Best”He called 2020-2023 the “crazy years” Bitcoin is a new currency.
He said that the years he was referring to were part of an overall period. “crypto chaos,” A period in which Bitcoin emerged as the most dominant crypto-asset.
Saylor explained that the next phase is the adoption of Bitcoin by institutions and businesses. He told Bitcoin Magazine. X Spaces On April 30, a day before the start of the conference, he said that, in his opinion, this new era started on January 20, 2024. 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs launched The United States
But let’s go beyond Saylor to see what Hunter Horsley, CEO of the American Institute for Cancer Research has said. Take a look at what Hunter Horsley says, the CEO of BitwiseThe 11 financial What institutions who launched an ETF for Bitcoin in the US had to say on institutional interest in Bitcoin.
“The bitcoin ETFs have really brought bitcoin into the realm of possibility for a lot of traditional financial institutions,” Horsley was speaking on a conference panel the second of the two-day event.
“A lot of traditional and reputable firms have started engaging with bitcoin in a way they never have before, but so few of them are saying anything about it. If you just scroll through your LinkedIn or you read press releases, you would think that nothing has changed versus last year, but, for now, most — or many — are preferring not to have it be public,” He added.
Bitwise CEO: Bitwise has a $3.5 billion valuation "A lot of traditional and reputable firms have started engaging with #Bitcoin in a way they never have before, but so few are saying anything about it."
"Banks are reaching out to us" 👀 pic.twitter.com/h0jjhrzZQ6
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) May 2, 2024
Alexander Leishman is the CEO and CTO of Bitcoin Exchange RiverIn his speech, he also noted that, while bitcoin buying has been traditionally a phenomenon of retail investors, increasingly more companies are starting to dip their feet into bitcoin waters.
Leishman said in one slide that although the percentage of companies and funds/ETFs holding bitcoins may seem small, it’s higher than what they were previously.
“We have businesses, funds and ETFs and governments, these large institutions, these blue and black bars. These bars have gone from virtually nothing to where they are today, but they’re continuing to grow,” Leishman said.
“Retail is not really driving the recent rally in the bitcoin price. Consumer interest in bitcoin is nowhere near its all-time highs. So, what is driving this price increase? We think that one big factor is institutions,” He added.
David Marcus, CEO and founder of LightsparkInstitutions will soon be using bitcoin for payment, not just to keep it on their books or to offer to their clients.
Lightspark Uses Lightning To Connect Businesses Worldwide
Saylor and Marcus had a short fireside conversation to conclude the first conference day. former executive at PayPal and former lead for Facebook’s abandoned cryptocurrency project Libra. To discuss the Lightning Network Connecting businesses around the globe.
Lightspark made headlines The day before the conference started, Coinbase announced that it would use Lightspark for US Lightning users.
Marcus stated that Coinbase would be just one company among many who will harness Lightning’s power in the near future.
“In a world where you’ll have hundreds of millions if not billions of people that have an address for money that can be settled in real time in the currency that they’re choosing, you can imagine all kinds of new applications [for businesses],” Marcus said that companies can use Lightning not only to send fiat currencies but also digitized versions.
"The time is now to enable fast cheap, realtime movement of Bitcoin and other assets [on Lightning]."
-David Marcus, CEO, LightSpark @lightspark#BitcoinforCorporations— MicroStrategy (@MicroStrategy) May 1, 2024
“Streaming money to endpoints is one of them. New forms of payments for merchants that would reach new audiences or new client bases that they couldn’t reach [previously]. The ability to create brand new business models to enable people to actually contribute to anything that you’re building from anywhere around the world,” He added.
“It will have an impact on the world that is going to be as important as the internet itself was in its own time for communications.”
Marcus also spoke about how businesses are much more international than Bitcoin users, and that they will benefit greatly from the ability to move value across the globe in real-time via Lightning.
Marcus and Saylor’s conversation was a great way to get pumped up about Bitcoin and Lightning.
After Cezary Rakzko’s, MicroStrategy Executive Vice President for Engineering, it was hard not to believe in Bitcoin as an exchange and store of value, as well as as a trust platform. revealed its plans for MicroStrategy OrangeA decentralized identity platform (DID), built on Bitcoin blockchain.
MicroStrategy Orange
MicroStrategy Orange, an enterprise platform, enables organizations to use DID applications built on top of Bitcoin.
MicroStrategy was a pioneer in the development of a Bitcoin-based technology.
“The platform consists of three fundamental pieces,” Raczko, said “At the heart of it, is a service cloud hosted that allows you to issue those identifiers 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 the applications into your own services. And the Orange apps are going to be prepackaged solutions that address specific digital identity challenges.”
This news came as a pleasant surprise to many at the conference, as it illustrated that MicroStrategy wants to continue to lead the way with Bitcoin adoption — outside of its store of value use case — as we enter this new era of businesses and institutions adopting Bitcoin.
Bitcoin for Corporations: Normalizing Bitcoin
The conversation on the stage and outside of it revolved around Bitcoin becoming less taboo and more mainstream, which makes it harder for businesses and institutions to ignore.
Becca Rubenfeld COO of AnchorWatchSam Abbassi is the founder and CEO HosekiNathan McCauley co-founder, CEO and president of Anchorage DigitalThe companies and institutions who once dismissed Bitcoin, deeming it a mere fad/scam, now want to know how they can use it.
“It’s exciting to be at a stage of adoption where access to bitcoin is being expanded to businesses and their clients,” Rubenfeld tells Bitcoin Magazine. “This event is particularly oriented to that, which allows conversation to be focused on the benefits and challenges unique to that new set of Bitcoin owners.”
Although it has taken some time before corporations began to embrace Bitcoin, we are now at the dawn of a period where they have begun to appreciate its worth.
It seems that even if institutions and companies haven’t adopted a standard for bitcoin in the manner that MicroStrategy did, they are still willing to get some exposure to Bitcoin the asset.
Michael Saylor at MicroStrategy and his team are responsible for the success of this project.
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Source: bitcoinmagazine.com