The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Bombshell: Saylor Reveals When He Would Sell - EXCLUSIVE

Episode Date: May 10, 2026

Michael Saylor has said "never sell your Bitcoin" for years — but in this exclusive interview at Consensus in Miami, he told me why that's changing. Strategy now holds 818,000 Bitcoin worth $65 bill...ion, and Saylor explains why signaling a willingness to sell is actually critical to protecting the asset's value on their balance sheet. But here's the twist: for every Bitcoin they sell, they're buying back 5 to 10x more in the same month. He also breaks down how STRC has exploded from zero to $8.5 billion in eight months, why DeFi builders are already tokenizing it into yield coins, and how digital credit could reshape the entire crypto ecosystem. This is the conversation Wall Street and crypto Twitter need to hear. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 You've always said never sell your Bitcoin. You floated the idea to at least let them know that it's there to be sold in theory. How much unencumbered Bitcoin do you have? It's all unencumbered. It's 818,000 Bitcoin. If we were to say we're never going to take advantage of that liquidity, then we're impairing the asset, which 98% of the company is built on. We might sell 20 basis points of Bitcoin in a month. We'd probably buy 5x or 10x that much in the same month.
Starting point is 00:00:28 So Stretch represents a bank account that pays you 11.5%. We found a consistent way to buy tens of billions of dollars of Bitcoin with credit market capital. I say I'm buying the top forever. I'm happy to buy at $60,000. I'm happy to buy it $80,000. I'm happy to buy it $200,000, $500,000. A million, $2,000, $4 million, $8,016 million. So we're here at Consensus in Miami.
Starting point is 00:01:10 You're giving a keynote this afternoon. Can you give us a preview of what that's going to be about because I think it's probably a topic worth discussing? Well, we've created digital credit and we think Bitcoin is digital capital and we think the killer app of digital capital is digital credit and stretches digital credit. So Bitcoin is a 40-vall, 40-AR asset and we have stripped most of the volatility and most of the risk off it and we extracted about 11% yield with about three-val. we think that's the gateway to get to digital money, because if I can strip 40 vol, 40 AR down to 11% or 11.5% yield and 3 vol, the next step is zero vol, 8%. And so if you want digital money, the ideal money is like a stable coin or a bank account that pays you 8%. And right now, people are developing those yield coins, zero vol, 8% money. And that's that they're developing. And they're doing it with digital credit. So I'll be speaking about how we created digital credit, which has exploded. It's gone zero to eight and a billion dollars in eight months, and is growing 350% a year.
Starting point is 00:02:21 So I'll speak about that phenomenon. I'll talk about why that is spreading through the Tradfai ecosystem. And then I'm going to talk a bit about digital money and digital yield, how you can take stable coins and D5 protocols and loop that credit 3x5X. you either get a stable coin or a yield coin that pays 8% or maybe you create a 25% 3x levered or looped digital yield token or digital yield fund. And so I think what's fun right now is digital credit
Starting point is 00:02:57 is bringing the capital gains and the power of Bitcoin to the crypto and the digital assets ecosystem in the form of yield coins and defy. and we're merging what we're seeing the two hemispheres of the industry crypto and bitcoin come together so instead of having capital and crypto that never finds bitcoin and capital and bitcoin that never goes into defy or or crypto industry now the capital flows in it flows the yield coins it flows to digital credit it flows to bitcoin it loops back and it invigorates the entire industry how does this work structurally is it still backed by bitcoin or are we really taking a departure from that and utilize
Starting point is 00:03:38 all the other benefits of crypto, as you said, and kind of creating an ecosystem that flows back and forth. It's obviously a departure for many bitcoins to think about using stablecoins and earning yield and defy and things that are kind of foreign to them. Well, you know, there was always this mythical. Wouldn't it be great to have a Bitcoin back stable coin that paid you? I've never understood how those stablecoin exploded on Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah, and the issue is it's very difficult to go from 40 vol to zero vol. Like that's a massive, massive shift. How do you strip all of the volatility off of Bitcoin
Starting point is 00:04:14 and get to perfectly peg to the dollar and extract a yield? What we discovered is you need that intermediate step, and the intermediate step is digital credit. So the idea behind stretch or digital credit is you're converting a capital gain into a dividend, you know, a credit dividend. So if I expect 30% returns on Bitcoin capital, I can just strip the first 11% and pay it as a credit dividend.
Starting point is 00:04:43 So the way we created stretch is we created a preferred stock that's a monthly variable rate preferred and we pay like 11.5% right now. And the way we fund that dividend is through investing in Bitcoin and then capturing a portion of the Bitcoin capital gain, monetizing it. And so,
Starting point is 00:05:03 The first step to creating digital money and yield coins and putting yield into the defy ecosystem, which powers it. It's like electricity jacked into defy. The first step is create digital credit. And we were uniquely able to do it because we inadvertently built a $50 billion equity stack when we built strategy. And so we have about an $85 billion enterprise value now. We've got about $58 billion of equity. And for every dollar of equity, you can maybe sell 20 cents of credit. You know, you want to be 5x over collateralized. So we took our Bitcoin and everybody said, well, what are you going to do with the Bitcoin? How do you generate yield on the Bitcoin?
Starting point is 00:05:47 And we thought, well, we're going to actually sell the credit to generate the yield. So we discovered stretch. We created it. It exploded. It started growing 3 to 400 percent a year. You know, in the month of March, we sold about 1.5 billion. of it and in the month of April we sold 3.2 billion dollars of it so you know multiply 3.2 times 12 and it's a horrendant you know incredible terrific run rate so that was the first step you know
Starting point is 00:06:18 taking digital capital making a digital credit and people think well you know you're crazy to pay 11 and a half percent dividend yield but the point is it's a perpetual swap we're basically swapping you so far plus a credit spread forever and we're getting back Bitcoin return forever. And that's very different than a bond that's never coming due. And the company has the option to lower the dividend of Sofer Falls, and the company has the option to compress the credit spread over time as people get more comfortable.
Starting point is 00:06:48 If Bitcoin rallies, if they like the business model, as Bitcoin gets more institutionally adopted, as the credit rating agencies start to embrace digital assets and the banks embrace digital assets, we expect the credit spreads to come down. So that's how we create digital credit. We were fortunate enough to have a massive set of equity investors that support our stock.
Starting point is 00:07:13 We trade billions of dollars in equity every day. We're lucky enough to have a bunch of trad-fi derivatives traders. You know, we have about $40 billion of open interest in the options market. And yesterday, if you were watching CNBC at the end of the day, they said the number one biggest options trade in the entire United States today is strategy. some options trader is laying on a multi-hundred million dollar options bet, which surprised me.
Starting point is 00:07:40 So the point is we have options traders, derivatives traders that are supporting us. We have equity traders supporting us. We went in to Stretch with a bunch of hedge funds, and then the hedge funds started arbing Stretch, and Stretch became the biggest preferred stock in the world, and then it became the most liquid preferred stock in the world. And that all happened in about eight months. So Stretch exploded to be about $350 to $400 million of liquidity today. And here's the cool news, Scott. We didn't really understand the DFI space,
Starting point is 00:08:14 and we weren't heavily steeped in stable coins in DFI and crypto. We were always focused upon Bitcoin and TradFi. But a bunch of digital assets innovators, like Apex and Saturn and Pendle, they all started thinking about this, and they built yield coins, and they built tokens that were backed by stretch that generated yield. Because from their point of view, they're saying, am I going to power a yield with a real-world asset like a T-bill, which pays you 3.5%? Or am I going to power my yield with digital credit that pays 11.5%. So in essence, we're offering 11.5% yield into the DFI space as the same.
Starting point is 00:09:02 starting point and it's exogenous. It's basically backed by our 80 billion, you know, 58 billion of equity or 85 billion dollar enterprise value in our, our Bitcoin stack, which right now is almost 4% of the Bitcoin supply. So that becomes a competitor to, you know, other forms of yield in Defi. They started building that and that entire complex went from zero to $300 million in a matter of weeks. That week. It's just doing this and
Starting point is 00:09:31 and there's going to be a thousand interesting things to do there. I can't, you know, and it's very creative and it's very forward-thinking and progressive, and they move about 20 times faster than trad-fight. It's so interesting to me because we've had this trend in crypto of massive bubbles, explosion, and then you actually find a few legitimate use cases out of those ashes, right, that rise. And we saw the algorithmic stablecoin idea, which, you know, I think would be the first iteration of these yield coins, but they were backed by nothing.
Starting point is 00:10:04 Or they were backed, we even have some that are successful, that are backed by Ethereum staking or something, but that's three or four percent. You're talking about basically taking that idea, taking it to capital markets by something that's backed by a multi-billion dollar asset that's yielding safely 11.5%. So that conceptually it actually made a lot of sense they were just doing it with the wrong backing.
Starting point is 00:10:24 You know, isn't it, it's a beautiful thought that for 10 years people worked out all of these techniques, all of the math behind it on various forms of yield. And now we come along and we feed this digital credit into it. And they're already ready because they've already got the technique and the technology and they've been thinking about it. And so it's a really good partnership. I feel like some of the most radical innovations are when you're an engineer,
Starting point is 00:10:53 you take three components that we're lying on the table and you put them all together and you create a magical product. And so we didn't invent DFI. DFI's been here. If you look at Stretch or Digital Credit, we took Return of Capital tax accounting. It's 100 years old. We took preferred stocks.
Starting point is 00:11:12 They're 200 years old. We took publicly listed stocks. It's a 100-year-old idea. And we took Bitcoin. We plugged that in, and that made, you know, we created the world's best preferred stock by plugging in digital capital. And then we took that digital credit.
Starting point is 00:11:28 And if you look at Stretch, the TradFi investor says, okay, well, I can borrow money on Robin Hood at 5% or 4%. And I can start with one share and I can loop it once. Maybe I can lever it up to two shares. And I stop. I get a 2x lever and I can't get any further because Schwab or Robin Hood or TradFi prime broker dealers aren't going to give me any more credit. And there's Reg T, which keeps you from getting too much leverage.
Starting point is 00:11:56 But on the defy side, just like I can go and I can get 5x leverage. And if you would 5x leverage a Bitcoin, which is 5x lever of 40-vall asset, which is degenerate, right? Or 10x lever of 40-vall asset? Well, I mean, that I don't condone. But on the other hand, if we have a 2-vall asset
Starting point is 00:12:15 and then you 10x or 5x lever a 2-vall asset, okay, now I'm looking at 15-vall, but I'm extracting 35 or 40% yield, this is actually not irresponsible. So I think the idea was the right idea. The asset, there's no point in levering a T-bill 10x if the cost of capital is 4% and the return is 3.5%. You see, that doesn't work.
Starting point is 00:12:43 I just think it's funny because if you ask the average crypto person, they would tell you that 5x leverage was low and extremely responsible when we have 100x perpetual slops. And if you look at the 4x markets, people trade with 50 or 100x leverage just to get enough volatility for it to make sense. So it's not a foreign idea to use slightly higher leverage on low volatility assets. And now I'll give you the interesting idea, which is revolutionary for tradfai and for defy.
Starting point is 00:13:09 And is this. The sharp ratio is the risk-adjusted return. So I take the yield, I subtract the risk-free rate, I divide by the ball. Stretch has hit a sharp ratio of two and a half. Digital credit is two and a half. And we've got a proposal in front of our shareholders to cut the digital. to double the dividend frequency, and if we double the dividend frequency, we think that the volatility is going to fall further, and the sharp ratio is going to move north again. So let me put
Starting point is 00:13:38 that in perspective. A two and a half sharp ratio is higher by a factor of five than every credit instrument in the world, maybe a factor of 10. It's higher than every equity. Like, you know, the highest mag-7 sharp ratio is inviddi is 1.7. Every other equity is one or less. It's higher than every asset class. The sharp ratio of the S&P or Bitcoin are 0.8.9. The sharp ratio of gold, 0.5. It's higher than every hedge fund strategy. Every hedge fund where you're playing 2 and 20 and you've got lockups, if they could get a sharp ratio of 2 or 2.2, they could raise infinite money. Okay? We've created an instrument with a sharp ratio 2.5, 3 or so, and there's no fee. It's liquid, anybody can grab it, and that means that you put that in a token, you tokenize it,
Starting point is 00:14:32 you're saying to yourself, what's the instrument that I would like to plug into 10x leverage? And the answer is you want something with an extremely high sharp ratio, because when you 10x 2 vol, that's only 20 ball, that's just the S&P. Right. You know, and so we've created, I think, with digital credit, something which is really good for Bitcoin. We found a consistent bid, a way to buy billions, tens of billions of dollars of Bitcoin with credit market capital. And we've also created something which is really good for DeFi and really good for crypto,
Starting point is 00:15:06 because now we can power the entire DeFi and the entire crypto complex with something which has got 3x the energy of a T bill. Have you done the math? I'm sure you have on what the sharp ratio is if you added stretch to a 6040 portfolio. what it does for that entire portfolio, not the asset itself. You know, I mean, stretches like a universal financial sweetener. It's going to improve the performance and the sharp ratio of every portfolio. Yeah. I'm just curious you. I've always seen the, you know, add 2% of Bitcoin, your sharp ratio increases by this.
Starting point is 00:15:41 At 5% of Bitcoin, your sharp ratio, but there's a cap there. Well, Bitcoin is a sharp ratio of 0.9, stretches a sharp ratio of 2.5. And again, it's a simple idea, which is, I over collateralize the instrument four to one or five to one and I just strip out the first 11% because I'm highly confident that I'll get more than 11.5% over a decade and we've got 50 years of capital, right? We as a company strategy, we can absorb the volatility, we can absorb the weight, the duration risk, we can absorb the credit risk, we can absorb, you know, the capital risk, all of those things because we just have the stack of nearly $60 billion of equity and we're just creating that
Starting point is 00:16:28 first clean stream of 11% that goes into any portfolio. So you can almost say we're like providing hoddling as a service. I mean obviously anything you do or anything anyone does at the size you have critics and there's people who have been very critical of STRC's stretches structure. I mean is that the answer that you give to them, the one that you just did? I mean, know, obviously people think it's unsustainable, and you point out the math of how long you can sustain this, and the price that Bitcoin can go to, and you would still be able to pay the yield. So why do you think that... You know, I'm famous for this quote, you know, never sell you Bitcoin. And I think the first
Starting point is 00:17:10 year or two years, the way that we grew this business is we would fund the credit dividends by selling our common equity. Well, what we're really doing is we're funding credit dividends by selling a Bitcoin derivative, MSTR. But to a casual observer or a skeptic or a troll, they would say, well, you know, you're just feeding, you're paying the dividends of one type of equity with another type of equity, and they don't like that. So I think it's very important that we break that cycle
Starting point is 00:17:42 and illustrate what we're really doing is we're selling a credit instrument to buy a capital asset. We're selling credit to buy capital. The capital asset is Bitcoin. It's like you're selling credit to buy real estate, the real estate appreciates. You sell the appreciated real estate to pay off the credit dividends. Taylor's all this time. That's what you're going to say.
Starting point is 00:18:00 I mean, that's a proven strategy to accumulate wealth. You could boil it down to capital gains fund credit dividends. If you think about the theory of asset-backed credit, if you think that the capital investment is going to appreciate it 10% a year, you can pay a dividend of 5%. If you think the capital investment's going to appreciate 20% a year, you can pay a dividend of 10%. If you think that real estate's going up 7% a year, you can pay a dividend of three or four or five. We think Bitcoin's going up 30% a year.
Starting point is 00:18:35 We have no problem paying a dividend of 11. But you don't need it to. We don't need it to. We're so over-collateralized that the way it works out is if it goes up 30%, you know, when we, we, we, we, we don't need it to. that the way it works out is if it goes up 30%, you know, when we sell a billion dollars of STRC, if Bitcoin goes up, you know, 11%, we'd make a billion dollars in net income, our Bitcoin gain. If it goes up 22%, we'd make double that. We'd make $2 billion, a billion up front and a billion over time.
Starting point is 00:19:04 If it went up 30%, we'd make a billion up front and $2 billion on the back, and it's screamingly profitable for the equity investors. But on the other hand, all Bitcoin has to do is go up our break-even level, which is 2.3% for us to pay the dividends forever. And that's on average. That doesn't mean you can't have a down year. Yeah. On average, over forever, we need 2.3%. And if we don't get that, if we get 0%, we have about 50 years, 40 to 50 years to figure it out. So people, you know, the knee-jerk reaction is, oh, well, they borrowed money 11.5%. But what they don't understand is that, no, we're never giving the money back.
Starting point is 00:19:45 We sold equity. And so we sold equity at a variable credit spread over a long period of time. We really just need Bitcoin to go up 2.3% to create value for the common equity. And if it goes up, if you believe that Bitcoin's as good as the S&P, this is a no-brainer to do it. And if you believe that Bitcoin's better than the S&P, this creates massively amplified Bitcoin returns for the equity investor. So we found an extremely low risk, almost, you know, I'm not going to say risk-free because the lawyers go nuts, but it's an excessively low-risk way to swap the standard overnight funds rate for the Bitcoin return. And, you know, even the U.S. government,
Starting point is 00:20:29 you know, they get the standard overnight funds rate, but they have to pay the money back. We're saying we're going to give you the standard overnight funds rate, and we're not going to pay the money back, but we'll give you a credit spread. will give you a premium, and that makes it very interesting for a credit investor. But if you're a Bitcoin investor and you want to buy a lot of Bitcoin and hold it for 100 years, hold it forever, then this is the way to do that most intelligently and most aggressively. When SCRC was relatively new, we sat down in Vegas and you laid out the case, it was at Money 2020, so a TradFi audience rather than a Bitcoin or a crypto audience
Starting point is 00:21:03 for who would be interested in buying this and how it would benefit them. you talked about the massive increases over March and April. So obviously you were right. The interests came in and is continuing to grow. Who do you think is buying it and why? Can you see that or is it? I mean, the most important point is the Bitcoiners go, why don't it just buy Bitcoin?
Starting point is 00:21:23 And the answer is if you want to get on a 40-Val 40-A-R roller coaster and hold the money for four years and not touch it, you should buy Bitcoin. But only a small percentage of people, you know, have the conviction to do that. do that, the people buying stretch of retirees. You know, 65-year-old guy wants to live off of his retirement income. If, you know, they're conservative investors, they're corporate treasurer. Like, I need the money back in six months to pay taxes. I need the money in a year to pay my kids' tuition. I want to get paid double or triple or quadruple of money market, but I don't want to risk my principal.
Starting point is 00:22:03 So if you think about people that need principal protection, and they want to compound their wealth in a low risk, low anxiety way, they want to preserve their wealth while they compound it faster than inflation, that's a lot of people. And so, you know, Stretch represents a bank account that pays you, 11.5%. And if you walk down the street and you say to people, do you want to buy a highly volatile equity? Do you want to buy a highly volatile crypto asset? Or do you want a bank account that pays you 11% that you don't have to pay tax on for the next decade? You do the poll, it's not complicated.
Starting point is 00:22:52 There's a lot of people that will say no to the first two, and they'll say yes to the third. But here's one more point. Even the people that would say yes to the first or the second, Like if you're willing to bet half of your, half of your net worth on Bitcoin or half of your net worth on Nvidia, you still have money that you need to pay the mortgage, taxes, your kids' tuition, or you have working capital in your corporation. And that working capital is what I'll call short duration capital.
Starting point is 00:23:23 You know, you need it back in the next three years and you can't afford for it to be worth 30% less on a, you know, on a drawdown. And so everyone has working capital and digital credit is a really good fit for working capital needs of people in the crypto economy. And then it's really expanded the entire universe because it's drawn in all of these non-crypto investors, non-Bitcoin investors, non-Val investors. Scott, like, I've gone and I pitch Bitcoin to corporations. It takes you hours and hours. You've got to go to the board of directors and spend an hour or two hours in front of the board of directors. You have to convince the CFO, the treasurer,
Starting point is 00:24:05 every member of the board of directors, and if one member of the board of directors goes, you're done. I'm not sure. Okay, we'll wait for you. On the other hand, if you go to a corporate treasurer or a CFO and say, hey, I have something that yields 11.5% tax deferred.
Starting point is 00:24:20 Do you want to put 5% or 10% of your working capital into this instead of holding it in money markets? That's like the treasurer talks for a few minutes with the CFO, and if the CFO likes it, okay, it's done, they may or may not whisper in the ear of the CEO, but it's not a board-level decision. It's an operational decision in the finance department. And a lot of people, retail investors, other sorts of investors,
Starting point is 00:24:47 they have the same view, which is someone else, what do I want? I want someone else to take the risk, take the stress, deal with the, make the volatility go away, and just give me a return greater than the inflation rate. And like, do I have to trust them? Sure, just like you trust Apple, like you trust Google, like you trust Boeing. You know, the world's full of corporations
Starting point is 00:25:11 that we trust to provide a service that we need. And so this is a security. You have to trust the issuer. You have to accept risk to Bitcoin. But, you know, Bitcoin falls 80% tomorrow. The credit's still collateralized and you're still getting paid. Whereas if you put all your network,
Starting point is 00:25:31 and Bitcoin and it fell 80% tomorrow, you lost 80% of your money. So it's a very different risk proposition. And what we've found is it's a hundred times easier to explain and it's a hundred times more compelling because everybody wants something that's 3x as good as a money market. And it allows you to massively compelown the Bitcoin that you're buying, which is a nice side effect, obviously. So you mentioned, obviously, the open interest and how much interest there is in trading these or in purchasing them for that reason. How much of this do you think is the carry trade? Because obviously, you've got to imagine, I've even seen it all over Twitter, right? You're getting 11.5% on the STRC, even for the average person who can go to Schwab or Robin Hood or something
Starting point is 00:26:19 and take securities loan margin 5%. That's a 6% spread. Put that 5%. Not saying anyone would recommend this. and then you can obviously buy more STRC, effectively increase that yield. Seems like that's what hedge funds would be doing. You know, I think there's three trades that I can put my finger on right now. There's the retail buy and hold, you know, so you can live comfortably on your assets. 80% of STRC, when we did our last survey, is held by retail accounts. 80% of the shares. So by and large, the number one trade,
Starting point is 00:26:56 trade is I'm using it as a bank account or a money market because it pays 11 and a half. That's me. Yeah, I buy Bitcoin for my savings and I have a position in SDRC that's earning me yield. And you know, you live in New York, that's a bank that pays you 24%. Yeah, that's crazy. Okay, so that's the big trade. The second trade is there are hedge fund arms. They buy it a few days before the dividend record date. They sell it afterwards. And they kind of want to capture 20 or 30 cents per share by holding the instrument for one day. Buying below par, selling above par, do it again. And now it'll be every two weeks instead every month. Well, what they're doing is they're buying it at par and they're collecting
Starting point is 00:27:38 an 80 cent dividend and they're taking a 60 cent haircut and they're capturing 30 cents for eight hours of capital. Right. Okay. Makes sense. And that's fine. And that creates liquidity. And so that's a trade. The carry trade is harder to execute in Tradfai because, you know, you've only got an advance ratio of 50%. And, you know, they won't give you 5x leverage or 2x leverage very easily. So a lot of people that want to do that carry trade went into defy. So I think the rise of the carry trade, the exciting,
Starting point is 00:28:14 how do I take this asset and leverage 5x or 3x and get to 20, 354? 40% you know, I think that's coming out of the D5 protocols. And it's not a majority of the capital, which is fine. It's, you know, it's like zero to, you know, a few hundred million, and it's starting to come to life. And I think that'll be a good thing. But there's a race between people that want to do that, people that just want to hold it, and the corporates that are coming in. And also the credit index investors, like BlackRock and Van Eck, you know, uh, STRC is the number two holding in the PFF index. And it's the number two holding in the Van Act, you know, preferred index.
Starting point is 00:28:58 So there's a lot of different pools of capital that are coming in. And it's unclear to me which one will grow the faster. But it is pretty clear that the exciting thing for the normal person is I either swap my money from a money market into a digital credit. Or I go off and I borrow money at 5% and I live. lever the thing three to one and I go from a 11% yield to like a 25% yield and what's 3x leverage on a three ball asset is nine ball which is still less than holding the S&P index so how about I get principal you know stability and I get better than the S&P return and I'm using capital intelligently and you know I I I don't know how I feel about 10 to 20 I
Starting point is 00:29:50 X leverage, Scott. I just, I haven't worked it out yet. But I think two to three X leverage is rational and you know I've said this for five years. It's like if you can borrow money cheap, if SOFER goes to 300 basis points or 200 basis points and you can borrow money at 3%. Heck, I have a mortgage at 275 basis points. Yeah. And I'm like I used to say you know you could borrow money at two and a half or three percent and buy Bitcoin and people thought that crazy yeah but I think that if you can borrow money at 3% and you can buy something that gives you 11.5% and if an 80 billion dollar public company says they will handle the volatility and they will absorb the risk why wouldn't
Starting point is 00:30:36 you yeah I agree and obviously as you said before you've always said never sell your bit Bitcoin you floated the idea in your earnings call said you know inoculate the market to it which I think is just an evolution, in my opinion, right? Because you have to at least let them know that it's there to be sold in theory. How much unencumbered Bitcoin do you have? It's all unencumbered. It's 818,000 Bitcoin. The real key there, Scott, is we own about $65 billion of Bitcoin. If the market thought we would never sell it, the credit rating agencies would say, well, then I guess it's not an asset. And there's $20 to $100 billion liquidity in the Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:31:20 market that is not correlated to our equity or to our credit. If we were to say we're never going to take advantage of that liquidity and we're never going to use that asset, then we're impairing the asset, which 98% of the company is built on, it's pretty important for us to send the signal that if we need to, we can. Now, that's not the same as decrease our Bitcoin stack. The truth is we might sell 20 basis points of Bitcoin, like 0.2% percent. of Bitcoin in a month. We'd probably buy 5x or 10x that much in the same month. So people are getting caught up on that. But if you sell $100 million of Bitcoin in the same month that you buy a billion or $2 billion of Bitcoin, we're still net buyers of Bitcoin. We're still net holders
Starting point is 00:32:07 of Bitcoin. But the benefit to being able to fund with Bitcoin is we have the option to never sell a share of stock again. And that really rips the faces off of the shorts. That's good, right? And then we also have the option to capture the tax credit. Because we have billions of dollars of tax credits that if we were to simply sell the high basis Bitcoin, we would capture the tax benefit. And we could fund the dividend. And then with STRC, we're selling so much STRC that we'll buy back 10 Bitcoin for every one Bitcoin we sell. And if you can do that, I would recommend you do it too. It's not a bad business.
Starting point is 00:32:47 And it's just mechanics. It's not selling Bitcoin. It's not reducing your Bitcoin. Right. Makes perfect sense. So I've just found it fascinating to watch the evolution. How fast do you think the yield coins will become popular and I guess become accepted? There's always that moment where people are skeptical and then you have this sort of
Starting point is 00:33:09 Cambrian explosion of interest. We saw it with SCRC. You know, I'm watching Apex and they're adding sometimes a million dollars in TVL an hour. Like I'm watching the same with Saturn and they're ticking up millions of dollars a day. I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if we don't go through a billion dollars of capital, you know, in the yield coins in the next four to eight weeks. And then I think it could accelerate. It's a, I think this year is going to be a multi-billion dollar industry within the next few months.
Starting point is 00:33:46 It's growing very, very rapidly. I mean, stretch is growing 350% a year right now. So watch the next 90 days. Isn't that conservatively? I mean, I know you can't extrapolate March and April forward to December right at the same growth rate per month. But it could happen. Yeah, I think we're in hyper. The bottom line is we're in hyper growth stage.
Starting point is 00:34:06 And it's kind of a simple, it's a simple idea, which is, do you want to collect 3.5% yield and pay tax on it and collect 200 basis points after tax in your money market? Or would you like to collect 11.5% and defer the tax for the next decade? Okay? And the answer is, well, that sounds too good to be true. What's the catch? Of course I do. Okay, that's what's going on in Tradfai right now with digital credit.
Starting point is 00:34:33 Now in DFI, would you like to buy a stable coin that pays you zero? Or would you like to buy a year? And why don't you loop that 10x? Like, what is 10x levered zero? Or would you like to buy something that's backed by a treasury, that pays 3%. Well, what's the effective net yield on that? If you loop it 10x and you pay 3% cost of capital and collect 3%, that's nothing.
Starting point is 00:34:56 Or would you like to actually buy a yield coin that pays you 8 or 10 or 11% and not loop it? Okay, well, a stable coin that pays me, you know, yield coin pays me 8%. Well, why wouldn't I want that, right? Why wouldn't I buy 10, 20, 50, billion of that tomorrow, right? It's just, well, do I trust the issuer? It all comes down to, do I trust the issuer, do I trust that they've got their security protocols right, do I like the team that's doing it? And it's like when the bank sets up and they pay 8%, and every other bank pays zero, the money
Starting point is 00:35:31 will move or the capital will move when the investors trust the bank. And so this is really an exercise in education and execution and trust building. and it starts slow, and then it goes faster, and then all of a sudden it explodes. I think we've seen that. We've got 29 seconds left. Is there ever enough Bitcoin? Do you ever stop? No, I think our view is our job is to power up the network.
Starting point is 00:36:01 So I'm, you know, I say I'm buying the top forever. I'm happy to buy at $60,000. I'm happy to buy it $120,000. I'm happy to buy it $200,000, $500,000, $1,000, $2 million, $4 million. 8 million, 16 million, and people will make fun of me for doing it. But, you know, Bitcoin would be trading it 16 million a coin, and they can make fun of me all they want. For us, the key is for us to just be steady. The rest of the market will set the price. We will, you know, buy 10 Bitcoin, might sell one Bitcoin, buy 10 more, sell one more. Grind up. And I think it's
Starting point is 00:36:39 just good for everybody in the ecosystem. Everybody's winning. Thank you, Michael. Appreciate your time, as always. This podcast is sponsored by Weeks and was recorded live at Consensus 2026. You can find out more about what they have to offer by clicking on the link down below in the description. Thanks to Weeks for sponsoring.

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