Bitcoin Adoption Is The Start Of A Digital Revolution

It’s remarkable how far we’ve come in only a little more than a decade. Since its launch in 2009 by the pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin, the world’s first and largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and dominance, has seen astonishing rises in value. Taking a look back at when the digital asset saw its first significant price increase, going from trading at a few fractions of a cent to 0.08 cents and then to $1, no one could have predicted with absolute certainty that we would one day live in a world where the asset would have gained over 6 million percent. Well, it happened in only 12 years.

This astronomical growth gave birth to a whole new industry that has altered our perception of the financial world. It has also, just as expected, piqued the interest of millions of users worldwide. From nation-states to individuals, both private and publicly-owned companies and global financial institutions, these entities are either already invested and therefore now beneficiaries of this new monetary revolution, they are still on the sidelines thinking about how best to get involved, or just outrightly against the idea of this disruptive innovation, playing a blind eye to what it stands for, or just sadly oblivious of it.

The Pandemic Versus The Global Economy

Image by Gerad Altmann from Pixabay

2020 was an inflection point for the entire global financial market. The pandemic, as well as efforts by different countries to contain it, resulted in an unprecedented collapse of the global economy. In an attempt to salvage the situation, central banks lept into action, printing so much money that it further skewed the already unbalanced supply and demand relationship. That action laid bare what was already known, the fact that the monetary policies of most developed nations, and by extension the less developed ones, are tethered to a flawed system. After the markets crashed, it became clear that adverse measures had to be adopted if the world isn’t to end up in yet another recession. These measures had to be adopted at all levels, from the individual to the national, as well as at the corporate and institutional levels.

The cryptocurrency market wasn’t spared during the crash, of course. Devastating declines were experienced across the board. Bitcoin itself lost over 50% of its value in March 2021. But as a result of its intrinsically scarce nature, its recovery was unlike anything seen in modern times within the financial world. Over the space of eight months, Bitcoin was able to crawl and claw its way back up, breaking its previous all-time high of $20,000 reached at the peak of its 2017 bull run. And since then the price of the digital asset has been on an absolute tear, bulldozing its way through psychological levels of resistance, printing new all-time highs and defying all the fear, uncertainty and doubt thrown its way.

As expected, this parabolic rise in the value of the asset didn’t happen under the radar. Right before its steady climb, rumors and whispers of institutional interest in bitcoin began flooding the space, a lot of which was later confirmed by the institutions themselves. One such institution was MicroStrategy.

The Corporations Jump In

New York City skyline view. Image by Manuel Romero from Pixabay

In August 2020, MicroStrategy — the largest independent, Nasdaq-listed, publicly-traded cloud-based business intelligence provider — announced the purchase of 21,454 bitcoin for a total purchase price of $250 million, including fees and expenses. The company deliberated for months before deciding on a capital allocation approach. CEO Michael J. Saylor, went ahead to state that some macro factors — along with the public health crisis caused by the pandemic — forced governments around the world to adopt financial stimulus measures like quantitative easing to mitigate the crisis. Despite their best intentions, these measures may well depreciate the long-term real value of fiat currencies and many other various asset classes, along with many of those traditionally held by corporate treasury operations.

The company’s bitcoin acquisitions didn’t stop at 21,454 bitcoin. Overall, MicroStrategy is said to hold a total of 114,042 bitcoin worth $6,966,574,887 based on the current price of the asset at the time of writing. Their total acquisition was purchased for $3.16 billion at an average price of $27,713 per bitcoin.

Following the announcement of MicroStrategy’s acquisitions, news broke that Ruffer, a UK-based wealth management firm, had followed suit. The financial firm invested 2.5 percent of its $27 billion portfolio into bitcoin in November 2020. But unlike MicroStrategy who still holds bitcoin to date, purchasing a few thousands more now and again, Ruffer’s game plan was different. They opted to take out their initial investment of $650 million in profit, and subsequently, when the price of bitcoin began showing signs of weakness just before the May 2020 crash, they sold their entire position, turning a $650 million investment into $1.1 billion in the process.

If that isn’t evidence of the market’s potential, it’d be difficult then to think of anything else that could be. The wealth management firm wasn’t the only non-crypto or blockchain-native company to demonstrate this. The Tesla case, despite having a different twist, still pushed that narrative. The American electric vehicle and renewable energy company revealed in February that it had purchased 42,902 bitcoin worth $1.5 billion. They also announced that “according to relevant regulations and initially on a limited basis,” they have begun making arrangements to accept bitcoin payments in return for their products. This news, as predicted, had a tremendous impact on the price of the digital asset, driving investors into a buying frenzy that drove the price up by more than 20% in just a few days that followed.

As the months ticked by and the price of bitcoin verged into the unsteady waters that marred the second quarter of 2021, the air was saturated with fear, uncertainty and doubt. Different countries had begun yet again putting up measures to stifle the growth of the bitcoin and the entire cryptocurrency market, pushing out exaggerated data and false narratives about the Bitcoin network’s energy consumption, claiming that Bitcoin miningis not good for the environment. In the midst of all that, it was reported that Tesla had sold its bitcoin position and would no longer accept the asset as payment for their products. However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, tweeted in response to the heat he had been receiving from the cryptocurrency community, saying that “Tesla only sold ~10% of holdings to confirm BTC could be liquidated easily without moving the market. When there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with a positive future trend, Tesla will resume allowing bitcoin transactions.”

To date, the company still holds 42,000 bitcoin and is said to have no plans of selling.

The Change Of An Institutional Viewpoint

It is interesting to think about how things have changed though. A few years ago, a number of these corporations and institutions that are now hovering around bitcoin and some of the major altcoins, had a completely different opinion.

In 2017, analysts at Morgan Stanley, the American multinational investment bank, stated that “Bitcoin’s real value could be zero.” Fast-forward to 2021, Morgan Stanley became “the first big U.S. bank to offer its wealthy clients access to bitcoin funds.”

Also in 2017, Jamie Dimon, a long time to-date opponent of bitcoin and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., another investment bank, was quoted as saying, “Bitcoin is a fraud that will blow up;” furthermore that, “cryptocurrency is only fit for use by drug dealers, murderers and people living in North Korea.” Fast forward yet again to 2021, two of the investment bank’s strategists Amy Ho and Joyce Chang wrote; “In a multi-asset portfolio, investors can likely add up to 1% of their allocation to cryptocurrencies in order to achieve any efficiency gain in the overall risk-adjusted returns of the portfolio.” Jamie Dimon himself, still unchanged in his view, recently stated that he still sees bitcoin as “worthless,” but “our clients are adults. They disagree. If they want to have access to buy or sell bitcoin, we can’t custody it — but we can give them legitimate, as clean as possible access.”

Goldman Sachs, yet another multinational investment bank, reopened their cryptocurrency trading desk, a little over a year after they listed five reasons “why bitcoin is ‘not an asset class’, nor ‘a suitable investment.’”