Software development firm MicroStrategy has boosted its massive Bitcoin stash yet again, disclosing Monday that it purchased another $2.1 billion worth of the leading cryptocurrency last week in its fifth-straight weekly buy.
MicroStrategy added 21,550 BTC valued at $2.1 billion, with an average purchase price of $98,783, wrote founder and Executive Chairman Michael Saylor on X (formerly known as Twitter).
That pushes the firm’s tally to 423,650 BTC, valued at nearly $42 billion as of this writing, with an average price of $60,324 per Bitcoin.
MicroStrategy has accelerated its Bitcoin buys, snapping up the biggest virtual coin every week since November 11 by adding 171,430 new Bitcoins to its balance sheet. It has spent a total of $15.6 billion in that period.
The price of Bitcoin has since increased by nearly 22% since November 11 when it was trading for less than $81,000 per coin. Today, its price stands at $98,572, according to CoinGecko.
MicroStrategy was a small software firm that, in the words of Saylor, “couldn’t get ahead.” When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the company went into panic mode and started brainstorming the best way to protect shareholders as the value of cash was fast depreciating.
The answer was Bitcoin—and the publicly-traded firm under Saylor spent $250 million on 20,000 Bitcoin in August 2020.
MicroStrategy has been buying orange coins ever since, and now works as a “Bitcoin Treasury” or “Bitcoin development company” that securitizes the asset: the company uses debt to hoard enormous amounts of the cryptocurrency, and investors buy MicroStrategy stock as a proxy to directly buying the Bitcoin themselves.
Hedge funds have also become interested in buying convertible notes sold by MicroStrategy as a way to finance its Bitcoin buys.
So far, the bet has paid off: MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) has beat most other public companies in the U.S. as its stock has soared along with the price of Bitcoin. Since its first buy, the price of its shares has rocketed up by over 2,500%.
But with MicroStrategy’s fortunes now so closely tied to those of Bitcoin itself, it’s unclear how much investors would lose if the price of BTC were to crash.
Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication with additional details.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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