It’s 2045. Digital assets move at the speed of light. AI agents use Bitcoin as their base currency and interact millions of times per second. Bitcoin is currently the $200 trillion asset class, the payments class in the age of the Internet’s AI.
This is the future imagined by Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor, Executive Chairman of Strategy (MSTR). Saylor is a pioneer of Bitcoin’s Corporate Treasury and has transformed his burning software company into a $85 billion leveraged Bitcoin powerhouse listed on the NASDAQ.
Coindesk recently sat down with Saylor, Bitcoin’s ultimate maximalist, for a two-hour interview to break his vision for global Bitcoin domination.
Since the election of US President Donald Trump, Bitcoin has maintained its profit of 26%, peaking at a market capitalization of $2.1 trillion, touching the January high of $109,000. Bitcoin’s Wall Street Proxy strategy remains strong with a profit of around 50%, despite a decline of about 30% from its November high amid widespread decline in US stocks, US 10-year Treasury yields and oil.
The US has declared that the US will become the Bitcoin superpower and the world’s crypto capital, from enforcement-based regulating cryptocurrencies and secretly retired digital asset companies called “Operation Chalk Point 2.0.” For Saylor, the ocean changes mean that previously closed doors are open. Governments and traditional institutional investors who feared involvement with digital assets are now interested.
Saylor said he is keeping invitations to speak at all elite gatherings: 100 wealthy families in South America, the Sovereign wealth fund of the Middle East, Morgan Stanley’s prestigious technical council, CPAC, and the White House. He encouraged companies to adopt Bitcoin finances, and he ended up advising nation-states on establishing strategic Bitcoin reserves.
Bitcoin has reached “escape speed,” he said. Because when the US government begins to actively acquire it, the US becomes a beneficiary and forces all countries to adopt Bitcoin as global capital.
“It’s going to be a pest,” Saylor said. “This is one of the geopolitical moves where when accepting a network, you must first force all your allies to adopt, then all your enemies will adopt it.”
US Bitcoin Strategic Reserve
President Trump’s executive order to establish US Bitcoin Strategy Preparation represents a milestone in realizing the fate of the Bitcoin manifesto. At one point, the US had around 400,000 bitcoin, selling half of it with revenue of $366 million. Trump’s Crypto Czar Davids Sacks lamented that the cost to American taxpayers for selling the Bitcoin early is $17 billion at its current market value.
The executive order directs the Treasury Secretary to never sell US Bitcoin and develop budget-neutral methods to acquire more Bitcoin. Additionally, it will instruct you to create a digital asset stockpile. This is a portfolio of seized crypto assets that can be managed and readjusted as needed.
At President Trump’s White House Digital Assets Summit on March 7, Saylor proposed that the US could acquire 5%-25% of its Bitcoin supply by 2035, creating an estimated $100 trillion in economic value by 2045.
When asked about the proposal, Boheins, executive director of the Presidential Council of Digital Asset Advisors, said the Trump administration hopes the US will get as much Bitcoin as we can get, and is looking at a variety of creative ways, including Sen. Cynthia Ramis (R-WYO).
When the US accepts Bitcoin, global banks will inevitably continue.
“The Pandora box has been opened,” Saylor said. “When Bitcoin spreads…and if the banking system has $1 trillion in digital capital, it’s not only in the US, but the virus is spreading. So the virus is spreading. And in this case, it means that you have billions of banks and billions of banks and trillions of dollars.”
“Thermodynamically sound” money
Michael Saylor was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. He grew up in air force bases in the Midwest and in Japan and New Zealand. The Air Force Scholar sent Siroller to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a double degree in aviation, astronauts and history of science. The idea of ​​Saylor’s system, a literal rocket scientist, attracted him to Bitcoin’s “thermodynamically sound” design.
After serving as Air Force Reserve Captain in 1989, Saylor was a software company that rode the dot-com bubble after co-founding MicroStrategy before Saylor and two other micro-strategic executives were caught up in an accounting fraud scandal in 2000.
At MicroStrategy, Saylor has invented over 48 patents and developed numerous business ideas. Some have succeeded, but most have failed. Saylor said, ironically, his greatest success was someone else’s idea. Namamoto, the pseudonym creator of Bitcoin, created the “digital gold” he discovered while Saylor was shutting down during the Covid-19 pandemic. He grabs it out of despair and prefers to die quickly, rather than slow, if he fails.
In July 2020, MicroStrategy began steadily and continuously purchasing Bitcoin through essentially the cash flow, equity and debt. It climbed the 2021 Bull Run high and endured the 2022 Crypto Winter impairment charge. By 2024, Bitcoin’s corporate financial strategy had tested the battle. It survived the first crypto market cycle, with Trump’s bump attacking micro-tactics from $1 billion to $100 billion market capitalised companies.
“(Bitcoin) has become an opportunity,” Saylor said. “Then it became a strategy, and then suddenly, over the past 12 months, I realized that it’s a really good business.”
From MicroStrategy to Strategy
Rebranded as a “Strategy” and doing business has proven to be a highly desirable stock for institutional investors who want to be exposed to the volatile ups and downs of Bitcoin. In December, the strategy was recognized by the Nasdaq 100. Currently, I’m focusing on membership to the S&P 500.
To generate positive momentum, the strategy focuses on laser raising capital to buy more Bitcoin through large amounts of bond securities and creates a casino of financial instruments for traders addicted to Bitcoin volatility. By constantly measuring market conditions and fine-tuning yield parameters and conversion factors, the strategy has designed “intelligent leverage” designed to seduce demand and amplify each successive security amplifier to amplify each other with an infinite positive feedback loop.
“If you say it, it sounds like financial engineering, it’s absolutely financial engineering,” says Saylor. “It creates more pressure to raise the price of Bitcoin, which increases the price of MSTR. This will promote leverage of MSTR and increase the value of options. This will increase the demand that will cause demand and (convertible bonds).
The strategy raised about $33 billion to buy 500 billion Bitcoin through this financial engineering. It sparked an online debate over the ability of strategies to pay dividends or bond maturities if they can’t raise any sour markets or fresh capital. Money may not be derived from existing company cash flows. The benefits of strategy software can be ignored. According to MarketWatch data, it was negative between 2020 and 2023.
All this keeps the sailor at night. So the strategy is to keep all your options open.
“When the equity capital market gives us a massive premium, we sell stocks,” says Saylor. “If it’s too lever, remove the lever. If you feel that the capital market really doesn’t like selling securities, just stop and wait.”
Last week, the strategy surpassed more than 500,000 tokens by purchasing an additional 6,911 Bitcoins for $584 million using revenue from sales of MSTR common stock. They also announced a new STRF permanent offering that raised $7111 million to buy more Bitcoin, when it was about raising $500 million.
This latest preferred stock differs from the original STRK product in that it comes with a higher coupon (10% vs. 8%) and does not have a standard stock conversion provision. The prospectus for both offerings is a risk factor that includes the obligation to pay dividends accumulated “for some reason.”
The strategy also eliminated secured liabilities and thus eliminated the risk of liquidation of the company’s Bitcoin assets.
“We have built an indestructible balance sheet. Bitcoin could drop by 99%. There will be no margin calls coming. The equipment built has no pledge Bitcoin as collateral,” says Saylor.
Finally, the date you watch is when the strategy loan to the bondholder is due. The first “put date” is September 16th, 2027. If strategies fail to encourage bondholders to convert bonds into MSTR stocks or to convince them to wait for principal repayment the following year, these bondholders may require the strategy to buy back $1.8 billion in loans in cash. If the market is still hungry for Bitcoin exposure, it will be easier to raise capital and pay back to investors. If there is a market recession and Wall Street spigots are dry, your strategy may need to consider selling Bitcoin or defaults.
“Economic immortality”
But Saylor said, like the US government, the strategy would never “sell” Bitcoin. He bets on the eternal rise in BTC prices and everything about sovereignty, sound money, freedom and property rights idealized by the community.
Before he dies, Saylor may burn Bitcoin instead of handing over his assets. It is a “more ethically appropriate, ethically sound form of charity” and gives it “economic immortality.”
“If you trust that and burn those keys, everyone on the (Bitcoin) network has created something much richer and more powerful forever,” Saylor said. “We’ll all be together forever now and forever. Oh yeah, that’s my legacy.”
