More Companies are Holding Bitcoin than Ever Before

Bitcoin may still not have hit its record high of $ 20,000 in 2017, but its pandemic-time rebound makes it popular with big business. The king of cryptocurrency has seen strong growth, record trading volumes this year, and is still flirting with the $ 12,000 area despite having struggled to break the $ 11,500 resistance mark - a metric crypto traders - in recent weeks currently watching.

Many agree that Bitcoin's big boom over the past 10 years was largely the result of the FOMO for fear of missing out and even multibillion-dollar companies have succumbed to the temptation. Payment company Square is the youngest. Earlier this month, the company said it bought 4,709 bitcoins valued at about $ 50 million, accounting for about 1% of Square's total assets. "Square believes that cryptocurrency is an economic empowerment tool and an opportunity for the world to participate in a global monetary system that is consistent with the company's purpose," the company said in a press release.

Square's crypto investment, however, is a drop in the bucket compared to others. In August, business analytics firm MicroStrategy invested $ 250 million in Bitcoin, making it the first Nasdaq-listed company to adopt the cryptocurrency as its primary financial reserve. But that wasn't all. The following month, the company purchased 16,796 additional bitcoins for a total purchase price of $ 175 million. Now they own $ 425 million in Bitcoin. "This investment reflects our belief that Bitcoin, the world's most widely used cryptocurrency, is a reliable store of value and an attractive investment with more long-term appreciation potential than cash," said Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, in a statement.

Also earlier this month, $ 10 billion asset management giant Stone Ridge confirmed it had invested $ 115 million in Bitcoin. But Grayscale (from the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust) is still the overall king of Bitcoin stocks with 449,596 BTC. That means that Grayscale holds 2.14% of the 21 million Bitcoin stocks in the digital world. It's a pretty strong argument for Bitcoin to be accepted by the mainstream corporate environment, which has more than 600,000 BTC on their balance sheets. Even with such large corporate holdings of Bitcoin, predicting the bottom line is as cryptic as the currency itself.

Andy Edstrom of the California-based WESCAP group recently said that a bitcoin will be worth $ 400,000 by 2030. That means it could become an $ 8 trillion asset, worth about as much as the entire gold market. A similar view has been taken by Germany's largest lender, Deutsche Bank, which suggests that cryptocurrencies could replace cash payments within the next decade. Software businessman John McAfee predicted last year that the price of Bitcoin would soar to $ 1 million by the end of 2020. But now he is behind bars for fraud and even called his predictions utter "nonsense".

At the meeting in Davos, Switzerland last year, the top investor in the crypto space, Jeff Schumacher from BCG Digital Ventures, said that Bitcoin is a purely speculative asset with no underlying and that it could even go down to zero. Pick something, but big companies jump on board anyway and there's no time like a pandemic.