Since the beginning of 2020, Bitcoin’s price surged by 725%, reaching all-time highs above $64,000 last week. One of the huge drivers for such outstanding growth was a wave of big companies rushing to invest in the world’s leading cryptocurrency. After Tesla announced it has invested $1.5bn in Bitcoin and expects to start accepting the cryptocurrency as a payment for its electric vehicles in the near future, Bitcoin price went from around $39,400 to over $48,000 in less than 24 hours and continued rising.
However, Tesla is not the company with the largest Bitcoin holdings. According to data presented by AksjeBloggen.com, MicroStrategy, Tesla, and Square, as the three leading public companies on this list, together hold $7.6bn in Bitcoins. MicroStrategy alone, as the biggest investor, has over $5bn in Bitcoin assets.
MicroStrategy Doubled Its Investment in Less than a Year, Tesla’s BTC Holdings Jumped to $2.6B in Two Months
Although Tesla made headlines in 2021 with its announcement of investing in Bitcoin, the business-intelligence software company MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) holds over twice their amount of cryptocurrency.
According to the company’s financial report from March, MicroStrategy spent over $2.2bn to acquire 91,579 Bitcoins, which are now worth over $5bn. That means the company doubled its investment in less than a year. The downside is that, unlike Tesla, MicroStrategy used more than $1.6bn in convertible debt to finance them.
In February, the world’s sixth most valuable company, Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), announced it had purchased $1.5bn worth of Bitcoin for its balance sheet and that it would soon be accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment. Tesla ended 2020 with close to $19.4bn in cash and cash equivalents, meaning it invested less than 8% of its available capital in Bitcoin. As of this week, the value of the company’s Bitcoin holdings jumped by 75% to $2.6bn.
As the third-biggest Bitcoin buyer among public companies, Square Inc, spent $200 million to buy 8,027 Bitcoins. Today, the US financial services and digital payments company holds almost half a billion dollars in BTC assets.
The World’s Best Performing Asset With a 13,000% Five-Year Growth
As the top performer this year and in 2020, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are becoming difficult for big institutions to ignore. Since April 2016, Bitcoin’s price surged by a staggering 14,000%, which is 110 times better than the total return of the S&P 500 in the five-year period.
With big companies rushing to invest significant amounts of money into the world’s leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin’s price is expected to continue rising.
The maximum and total amount of Bitcoins that can ever exist is 21 million. As of April, there were just over 2.3 million Bitcoins left to be mined. The surging demand for Bitcoins, while its available supply is shrinking, will make its price grow even higher.
