Michael Saylor – the former CEO of MicroStrategy – is confident that despite all that’s happened over the past year or so, bitcoin is still a major safe haven for traders and investors.
Michael Saylor Still Believes in BTC
It’s interesting to see Saylor remain such a bull when it comes to bitcoin given how disastrous some of his BTC bets have been over the past several years. First beginning his bitcoin investments in late 2020, Saylor has continued to add the digital currency to his company’s balance sheet, a decision that has wound up costing MicroStrategy more than $1 billion at the time of writing.
All this stems from the hardcore volatility and speculation that was witnessed in the crypto space last year. 2022 – which was arguably the worst period on record for the digital currency arena – saw many leading assets (like bitcoin) lose a minimum of 70 percent of their values over the course of 12 months. Hitting a new all-time high of about $68,000 per unit in November of 2021, BTC ended the following year in the mid-$16K range.
Several other assets followed suit. This caused the space to lose more than $2 trillion in valuation, and while things ultimately looked terrible on paper (and they still do), Saylor is not about to give up his belief in BTC anytime soon.
In a recent interview, Saylor commented:
The only real safe haven for an institutional investor is bitcoin. Bitcoin is the only universally acknowledged digital commodity, so if you’re an investor, bitcoin is your ‘safe haven’ in this regard.
There was a time when MicroStrategy’s stock was so tied to bitcoin that the company’s shares were falling in value along with the digital asset’s price, though things have ultimately turned around for the firm as he pointed out in his discussion. He mentioned:
When we think about the corporate strategy and its effectiveness, we go back to the summer of 2020… We pick [several] different benchmarks. I think the most important is bitcoin’s performance. Nobody who talks about bitcoin points out that despite its volatility, it’s the best-performing asset over the past two and a half years. MicroStrategy stock is levered against bitcoin.
FTX Might Have Been a Good Thing
Not long ago, Saylor commented on the FTX debacle and said that while the situation was no doubt harrowing, it ultimately helped the crypto space in a lot of ways. He stated:
The crypto meltdown was painful in the short term, but it’s necessary over the long term for the industry to grow up… This industry has some good ideas like digital currencies and assets moving at the speed of light that are unstoppable and a digital commodity that can’t be debased. It also has a lot of entrepreneurs that implemented those good ideas in an irresponsible fashion.
