Author: Daniel Phillips and Stephen Gr; Compiler: Vernacular Blockchain
For many years, the idea of public companies buying Bitcoin as reserves was seen as a laughable one. The top cryptocurrency was considered too volatile and too niche to be accepted by any serious business.
However, this taboo has been thoroughly broken, with many major institutional investors buying Bitcoin in recent years.
The door first opened when cloud software company MicroStrategy purchased $425 million worth of Bitcoin in August and September 2020. Other companies followed suit, including payment processing company Block and electric car maker Tesla.
According to BitcoinTreasuries, public companies holding Bitcoin now account for nearly 1.5% of the total 21 million Bitcoins.
MicroStrategy is a well-known business analysis platform that has made Bitcoin its main reserve asset.
The company that produces mobile software and cloud-based services has actively pursued the purchase of Bitcoin, acquiring millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. As of May 2025, the company held 214,400 Bitcoins, equivalent to $14.8 billion, more than 1% of the total issuance of Bitcoin.
MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor once said that he used to buy $1,000 of Bitcoin per second. During the company's first quarter 2024 earnings call, Saylor claimed that the company's adoption of a "Bitcoin strategy" has improved the performance of its rival enterprise software companies in the business intelligence field by 10 to 30 times.
Unlike other CEOs who typically avoid discussing their personal investments, Saylor has publicly stated that he personally holds 17,732 bitcoins, currently valued at more than $1.2 billion.
According to BitInfoCharts, if it is assumed that Saylor's bitcoins are all stored in a single address, this would make him one of the top 101 holders of the most bitcoins. This is arguably a change of attitude for the MicroStrategy CEO, who in 2013 had claimed that bitcoin's days were numbered.
"We are in the early stages of Bitcoin's rapid institutional adoption as a digital asset," Saylor said in the company's first quarter 2024 earnings call. He added that in the future, Bitcoin will not compete with other crypto assets, but with gold, art, stocks, real estate, bonds and other forms of stored value in wealth creation, wealth protection and capital markets. ”
Not surprisingly, Bitcoin mining company Marathon Digital is also a large holder of Bitcoin, holding 17,631 Bitcoins in its corporate reserves (worth approximately $1.23 billion as of May 2024). The company aims to build "one of the largest Bitcoin mining operators in North America, operating at the lowest energy costs." Before turning to crypto mining, the company was originally a patent holding company (often referred to as a "patent troll").
As of May 2024, Marathon Digital operates approximately 240,000 Bitcoin mining machines, capable of generating 29.9 EH/s of computing power, with an average operating power of 21.1 EH/s.
The company noted that after the Bitcoin halving in 2024, it will accelerate its growth plans to "mitigate the impact" and expressed its hope to double the scale of mining operations in 2024.
However, the company failed to meet its revenue target for the first quarter of 2024, citing reasons including "unexpected equipment failures, transmission line maintenance, and higher-than-expected weather-related restrictions in Garden City and other locations."
Electric car maker Tesla joined the ranks of companies holding Bitcoin in December 2020, investing "a total of $1.5 billion" in Bitcoin, according to an SEC filing.
Tesla sold 10% of its Bitcoin holdings in the first quarter of 2021; according to CEO Elon Musk, this was to demonstrate Bitcoin's liquidity as an alternative to holding cash.
Musk mentioned that due to the "rapid increase" in the use of fossil fuels in Bitcoin mining and transactions, Tesla announced that it would not sell any of its Bitcoin holdings and would consider using it for transactions again after mining "shifts to more sustainable energy." He later clarified that the company would resume using Bitcoin for transactions once miners used 50% clean energy.
In July 2022, Tesla revealed in its second quarter 2022 quarterly update that the company had sold "about 75%" of its Bitcoin holdings, and its balance sheet showed that the total digital asset sales reached $936 million. In a conference call with analysts, Musk said the company did this to strengthen its cash position to cope with the uncertainty of COVID lockdown measures. At the time, he also added that the company is "willing to increase our Bitcoin holdings in the future, so this should not be viewed as some kind of ruling against Bitcoin."
According to bitcointreasuries.org, as of May 2024, Tesla held 9,720 Bitcoins in its portfolio (about $677 million at current prices). The company has maintained its Bitcoin position, and its balance sheet for the first quarter of 2024 showed an estimated value of $184 million as of the third quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024.
Musk has also become an enthusiastic supporter of Dogecoin, and Tesla allows the use of Dogecoin to purchase some goods.
Bitcoin mining company Hut 8 holds 9,109 Bitcoins, about $644 million at current prices.
The company went public on the Nasdaq Global Select Market in June 2021 under the ticker symbol HUT. The company’s SEC filings state that it is committed to increasing shareholder value by increasing the volume and value of its Bitcoin holdings.
The company also explains that it generates fiat currency revenues from its self-mined and held Bitcoin reserves through a yield account arrangement with a leading digital asset prime brokerage firm.
In November 2023, the company merged with another Bitcoin mining company, US Bitcoin, and the combined company will bill itself as an “energy infrastructure company targeting Bitcoin mining and data centers.” These mining centers are located in six locations in Alberta, Texas, and New York, and reportedly have a self-mining capacity of 7.5 EH/s.
In its first quarter 2024 results, the company reported $51.7 million in revenue for the quarter, a 231% year-over-year increase.
Another cryptocurrency mining company in the United States, Riot Blockchain, holds 9,084 bitcoins, worth $643 million at today's prices.
The company's valuation has risen from less than $200 million in 2020 to more than $6 billion in 2021, and the Nasdaq-listed company has been actively expanding. In April 2021, the company spent $650 million to purchase a one-gigawatt Bitcoin mining facility in Rockdale, Texas; the company described the purchase as a "transformational event" that makes the company "the largest publicly traded Bitcoin mining and hosting company in North America, measured by total developed capacity."
In April 2022, Riot announced further plans to build an additional one-gigawatt mining facility in Navarro County, Texas. After the 2022 cryptocurrency market crash, CEO Jason Rice told Yahoo Finance that Bitcoin mining will "continue to thrive in the United States," and stated that "despite the decline in the economics of Bitcoin mining, there remains a huge opportunity here."
By January 2023, the company changed its name to Riot Platforms, aiming to diversify its business model as the cryptocurrency mining industry faces challenges from the ongoing crypto winter and rising energy prices.
In early 2024, the company warned shareholders that there was "no guarantee" that the upcoming Bitcoin halving would have a positive impact on its profitability. In June, the company became the target of short-seller Kerrisdale, who claimed that "Bitcoin mining is one of the dumbest business models we have encountered in the past 15 years of short trading," but the company's stock price quickly recovered after an initial drop following the report.
Undoubtedly, the most well-known cryptocurrency company on this list is cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase, which conducted a landmark direct listing on Nasdaq in April 2021.
Before the listing, in February 2021, Coinbase revealed that it held $230 million in Bitcoin on its balance sheet. By June 2024, it held 9,000 Bitcoins in its reserves, worth just under $642 million.
Galaxy Digital Holdings, a cryptocurrency-focused merchant bank, holds 8,100 Bitcoins. This is down from 16,400 Bitcoins held in July 2022, although Bitcoin price growth means the USD value of its Bitcoin holdings in June 2024 is close to $578 million, compared to the $357 million value of its reserves two years ago.
Galaxy Digital Holdings is a company founded by Michael Novogratz in January 2018, and it has partnerships with cryptocurrency companies including Block.one and BlockFi. Unsurprisingly, Novogratz is a staunch supporter of Bitcoin, saying in March 2024 that Bitcoin would never fall below $50,000 again and predicting a few months later that Bitcoin would soar to $100,000 by the end of the year.
Galaxy Digital is one of the companies that manages the US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that received historic approval from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in January 2024.
In October 2020, Block, along with Tesla, ignited the fuse for institutional investment in Bitcoin when it invested $50 million in Bitcoin. By June 2024, the company held 8,027 Bitcoins, worth approximately $573 million. This is perhaps not surprising, as the company's CEO Jack Dorsey is an active advocate of Bitcoin (even running his own Bitcoin node).
At the time of the initial investment, the company described it as "part of Square's ongoing commitment to Bitcoin," noting that "the company plans to continuously evaluate its total investment in Bitcoin in light of its other investments."
The company has already invested in Bitcoin technology, launched its own Bitcoin wallet, and developed Bitcoin mining ASIC chips. In April 2024, its payment services subsidiary Square announced that it would enable businesses using its Cash App product to automatically convert a portion of daily sales into Bitcoin.
In May 2024, the company announced that it would reinvest 10% of profits from Bitcoin-related products and services into Bitcoin on a dollar-cost average (DCA) basis for purchase plans.
The company changed its name from Square to Block in December 2021, an obvious reference to the blockchain technology on which Bitcoin is based. The name change was a rebranding after Dorsey announced a week in advance that he would step down as CEO of Twitter to focus on the payment company.
The US Bitcoin mining company CleanSpark holds 6,154 Bitcoins, worth approximately $439 million as of June 2024.
Before the Bitcoin halving in 2024, the company expanded its operations and acquired three Bitcoin mining facilities in Mississippi for $19.8 million, adding 2.4 EH/s to its mining capacity. The company also added a third facility in Dalton, Georgia, adding an additional 0.8 EH/s of mining capacity.
In June 2024, CleanSpark revealed that they mined 417 Bitcoins in May and claimed to have "exceeded industry expectations" in the first full month of production after the halving. The company also stated that it plans to further expand to a location in Wyoming in the "coming days."
Germany-based venture capital firm Bitcoin Group SE ranks lower on the list, holding a relatively small number of 3,830 Bitcoins, worth $275 million at current prices.
The company's investments include cryptocurrency trading platform Bitcoin.de and Futurum Bank. The two companies merged in October 2020 to form "Germany's first cryptocurrency bank." The move followed a decision by the German parliament to allow banks to sell and store cryptocurrencies. Marco Bodewein, managing director of Bitcoin Group SE, highlighted the opportunity to introduce the bank's institutional investors to the "high returns and security features" of cryptocurrencies.
In a research report on Wednesday (May 15), BTIG stated that the latest Bitcoin halving has reduced the block reward from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC, causing less efficient mining equipment to go offline as miner income dropped to a level equivalent to a Bitcoin price of around $30,000.
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