Markets
Michael Saylor Predicts Bitcoin Market Cap Will Reach $280 Trillion by 2045
No Bitcoin conference would be complete without an injection of bullish optimism from Michael Saylor, and the MicroStrategy executive chairman delivered on that promise in Nashville on Friday.
The macroeconomic stars have aligned to send Bitcoin to the moon, Saylor believes, predicting that Bitcoin Market Capitalization will reach $280 trillion by 2045, eclipsing categories like art and gold. That’s an increase of about 280 times from its current market cap of just over $1 trillion.
Saylor is believed to be the owner more than a billion dollars In Bitcoin MicroStrategy has built a reputation as the largest holder of bitcoin, holding more bitcoin than any other publicly traded company. As of Friday, the company held about 226,000 bitcoins in its coffers, worth about $15.3 billion.
Speaking in front of hundreds of attendees at this year’s annual conference, Saylor’s keynote speech drew an estimated 8,000 attendees. Some lined up for over an hour to watch the renowned Bitcoin thinker and hear him speak in person about his ever-growing adoption of Bitcoin.
“The global economy is in trouble because we rely on imperfect assets and systems to store that capital,” Saylor said, calling Bitcoin “the little orange asset that it could be.”
Saylor discussed the “useful life” of various assets, from government-backed debt to Ferraris, which don’t last very long. The famed Bitcoin evangelist compared these assets to digital capital, an innovation he said could far outlive them.
“Entropy dilutes the value of their physical assets,” Saylor said, citing “war, famine and catastrophe” as other factors that harm the value of normal assets over the long term.
But bitcoins held by a custodian could have a useful life of about 1,000 years, Saylor said. Self-held bitcoins could have a useful life of 10,000 years, he added. And bitcoins held by artificial intelligence, he said, could last 100,000 years. That view partly helps explain Saylor’s radical turn to bitcoin just four years ago.
MicroStrategy began acquiring bitcoin for its corporate treasury after the pandemic-induced stock market crash of 2020. And it hasn’t slowed down since. The company added about 12,000 bitcoins to its balance sheet in June, when the price of bitcoin was hovering around $65,000, according to Bitcoin Treasury BondsThe acquisition represents MicroStrategy’s 39th purchase since its first Bitcoin purchase for around $12,000 in August 2020.
Saylor often cites MicroStrategy’s stock price as evidence of its success. Since the beginning of the year, the company’s stock price has climbed 155% to about $1,750, and reached as high as $1,919 in March.
“On August 10, it will be 48 months since we started down this path,” Saylor said, noting that many companies are now trying to copy chipmaker Nvidia. “The irony is that it’s easy to copy MicroStrategy. I just gave you the manual.”
OneMedNet, a publicly traded technology company that provides clinical imaging solutions, actually took a cue from Saylor before the executive spoke. The company announced just before that it had invested $1.8 million from a private placement in Bitcoin.