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New Bitcoin Whales Emerge in the Business World
Even though Tesla is the best-known name among the world’s biggest buyers, several companies have amassed significantly more bitcoin, causing their stock prices to skyrocket in the last year. At the same time, the vast majority are in North America, with the exception of Nexon, a video game publisher based in Japan.
This graph, via Marcus Lu of Visual Capitalist, shows the public companies that own the most bitcoins, based on data from CoinGecko.
MicroStrategy at the top
As the world’s largest bitcoin-owning company, MicroStrategy holds 174,530 bitcoins worth an estimated $9.1 billion to February 22, 2024.
Based in Virginia, the intelligence software company began buying Bitcoin in 2020 and has since grown its holdings to become approximately 10 times larger than those of the second largest business owner. MicroStrategy shares soared more than 350% in 2023 thanks to the scale of its Bitcoin holdings.
Here is who holds the most bitcoins in the world among public companies as of February 22, 2024:
Tesla is the fourth largest owner on the list, with Bitcoin holdings worth $546.7 million.
In 2021, the company announced that it purchased $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin to help improve its bottom line. This also served to provide liquidity to customers who could purchase its products with cryptocurrency. Yet the following year, the company sold a large portion of its holdings at a steep loss during the crypto crash.
Two Canadian companies, Hut 8 and Hive Blockchain, are the largest holders of Bitcoin. These cryptocurrency mining companies saw their stocks rise by over 191% and 144%, respectively.
With even higher returns, Bitcoin miner CleanSpark saw its shares rise more than 425% in 2023. This year, the company announced plans to purchase four new facilities to mine Bitcoin. Three of them are located in Mississippi and were purchased for a total of $19.8 million.
As bitcoin hits new highs, corporate interest in bitcoin could continue to rise alongside more buyers. Newly regulated Bitcoin Spot ETF have also fueled demand, leading Bitcoin’s market capitalization to reach $1 trillion for the first time since 2021.
In fact, as the chart above shows, BlackRock’s BTC ETF (IBIT) now holds more bitcoin than MSTR.
By Zerohedge.com
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