The Institutions Are Coming: The Dawn Of A New Era At This Year’s MicroStrategy World — Bitcoin For Corporations Conference
“Institutions are coming”
Anyone who has been in the Bitcoin space for a long period of time has heard some of the prominent figures in the space utter this phrase.
In August 2020, when Accurate strategya US-based business software company, announced that it would be Buy Bitcoin To add to her wardrobe, many believed it was the start of the institutional scramble.
But that was not the case.
certainly, Tesla bought some Bitcoin The following year, only for Get rid of 75% of it almost.
So from 2020 through 2023, MicroStrategy was an anomaly. During these years, the company – led by Bitcoin Permalink Michael Saylor – remained the only major company on Earth to convert a significant portion of its treasury into Bitcoin.
However, Saylor's vision for getting MicroStrategy on the Bitcoin standard has not wavered.
Instead, he redoubled his efforts and continued to guide MicroStrategy as it put more Bitcoin on its balance sheet. He also hosts a conference — MicroStrategy World: Bitcoin for Corporations — every year starting the year after his company makes its first bitcoin purchase as a way to show other companies how to emulate MicroStrategy.
This year's edition of the conference — held May 1-2 in Las Vegas, Nevada — marked the beginning of a new era, according to Saylor, one in which it's time for organizations to follow MicroStrategy's lead.
The era of Bitcoin for enterprises and companies has begun
In Saylor's keynote presentation on the second day of the conference titled “There's No Second Best,” he described 2020-2023 as the “crazy years” for Bitcoin.
He explained that these years were part of the “crypto-chaos” period, a period in which Bitcoin emerged as the dominant and most trusted cryptocurrency asset.
What follows the crazy years are the years in which institutions and companies embrace Bitcoin, Saylor said to Bitcoin Magazine in an article. X spaces On April 30, the day before the conference began, this new era is believed to have begun in January 2024, when 11 Bitcoin ETFs were launched in the United States.
Let's not just take Saylor's word that a new day has dawned. Let's think about what Hunter Horsley, CEO, said Bitwiseone of 11 financial institutions to launch a spot Bitcoin ETF in the US, had to talk about institutional interest in Bitcoin.
“Bitcoin ETFs have brought Bitcoin into the realm of possibilities for many traditional financial institutions,” Horsley said in a session during the second day of the conference.
“A lot of traditional, reputable companies are starting to engage with Bitcoin in a way that they've never done before, but few are saying anything about it,” he added. “If you just scroll through your LinkedIn or read the press releases, you might as well say anything about it,” he added. “You think nothing has changed compared to last year, but at the moment, most of them – or many of them – prefer not to go public.”
JUST IN: Bitwise's CEO says $3.5 billion worth "A lot of traditional and reputable companies have started doing business with them #Bitcoin In a way that has never been seen before, but so few people say anything about."
"Banks contact us" 👀 pic.twitter.com/h0jjhrzZQ6
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) May 2, 2024
Alexander Leishman, CEO and CTO of Bitcoin Exchange riveralso noted in his presentation that while buying Bitcoin has traditionally been a retail investor-driven phenomenon, more and more companies are starting to dip their toes into the Bitcoin waters as well.
In one of his slides, Leishman noted that the percentages of companies and funds/ETFs holding Bitcoin may not seem like much, but they are larger than in previous years.
“We have companies, funds, ETFs, governments, these large institutions, and these blue and black bars. These bars have gone from almost nothing to where they are today, but they continue to grow,” Leishman said.
“Retail is not really driving the recent rise in the price of Bitcoin. Consumer interest in Bitcoin is nowhere near an all-time high. So, what is driving this price increase? We think one of the big factors is institutions,” he added.
According to David Marcus, CEO of… Light SparkIn the near future, institutions will not only look to hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet or offer it to their customers, but will start using it for payments.
Lightspark uses Lightning to connect businesses globally
At the conclusion of the first day of the conference, Saylor sat down for a friendly chat with Marcus, a former PayPal executive and former leader of Facebook's abandoned cryptocurrency project Libra, to discuss how the Lightning Network connects businesses around the world.
Lightspark made headlines the day before the conference began, announcing that Coinbase would use Lightspark to integrate Lightning for its US users.
According to Marcus, Coinbase was just the first of many companies that would soon benefit from the power of Lightning.
“In a world where you're going to have hundreds of millions, if not billions of people who have an address to funds that can be settled in real time in the currency of their choice, you can imagine all kinds of new applications (for businesses),” Marcus said of companies using Lightning not only to transmit satellites, but also digital versions of fiat currencies.
"Now is the time to enable fast and cheap movement of Bitcoin and other assets (on Lightning)."
-David Marcus, CEO of LightSpark @lightspark#Bitcoin for businesses– MicroStrategy (@MicroStrategy) May 1, 2024
“Money flowing to endpoints is one of them. New forms of payments for merchants that can reach new audiences or new customer bases that they couldn’t reach[previously]. “The ability to create entirely new business models to enable people to contribute to virtually any Something you build from anywhere around the world.”
“It will have an impact on the world that will be as important as the Internet itself was in its time for communications.”
Marcus also touched on how companies are multinational in nature compared to individual Bitcoin users and would benefit greatly from moving value around the world in real time via Lightning.
It was hard not to be bullish on Bitcoin and Lightning after listening to Marcus and Saylor talk.
It was also hard not to be bullish on Bitcoin not just as a store of value and medium of exchange, but as a platform for trust after Cezary Raczko, Executive Vice President of Engineering at MicroStrategy, revealed his plans for MicroStrategy Orange, a decentralized platform. Identity (DID) platform built on the Bitcoin blockchain.
MicroStrategy Orange
MicroStrategy Orange is an enterprise platform that enables organizations to use DID applications, built directly on top of the Bitcoin base layer.
It is the first technology innovation involving Bitcoin that MicroStrategy was a part of.
“The platform consists of three basic pieces,” Raczko said. “In essence, there is a cloud-hosted service that allows you to issue these IDs to your users in your organization. It also allows you to deploy applications that run on MicroStrategy Orange. The Orange SDK allows you to integrate applications into your own services. Orange applications will be pre-built solutions that address identity challenges specified digital.
This news came as a pleasant surprise to many at the conference, as it made it clear that MicroStrategy wants to continue to lead the way in Bitcoin adoption — outside of the store of value use case — as we enter this new era of businesses and organizations adopting Bitcoin.
Bitcoin normalization for businesses
Conversations on and off the conference stage revolved around Bitcoin maturing from a taboo entity, into something that has become more normalized, making it more difficult for businesses and institutions to ignore.
In conversations I've had with Bitcoin industry leaders like Becca Rubenfeld, COO of… anchor; Sam Abbasi, Founder and CEO Hoseki; and Nathan Macauley, co-founder and CEO Anchorage DigitalI've learned that companies and organizations that once wrote off Bitcoin as little more than a scam or fad are now starting to inquire about how to adopt it.
“It is exciting that we are in the adoption phase where access to Bitcoin is expanding to businesses and their customers,” Rubenfeld told Bitcoin Magazine. “This event is specifically geared to that, allowing the conversation to focus on the unique benefits and challenges of this new group of Bitcoin owners.”
Although it has taken some time for businesses to embrace Bitcoin, it is clear that we are at the beginning of an era where businesses are starting to see the value in it.
Even if companies and institutions aren't necessarily ready to adopt the Bitcoin standard the way MicroStrategy has, it appears that more of them are willing to take exposure to some Bitcoin assets or start using Lightning for payments or applications that use the Bitcoin blockchain.
For that, we thank Michael Saylor and the MicroStrategy team.
