Ecoinometrics - Standstill for Bitcoin treasuries

Which institution will step up to buy Bitcoin in this economy?

Bitcoin as a treasury asset for businesses. Say it out loud. It has a nice ring to it doesn’t it? But as of today it remains niche.

Let’s do a roundup of who owns what and try to think why there aren’t more public companies rushing to add BTC to their balance sheet.

---

The Ecoinometrics newsletter helps you navigate the landscape of digital assets and macroeconomics with investment strategies backed by data. Subscribe to get an edge on the future of finance.

Done? Thanks! That’s great! Now let’s dive in.

---

Standstill for Bitcoin treasuries

Back in 2020 it looked like institutional Bitcoin treasuries might be something big. It started with Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy. We then got Tesla, Square and one might have hoped that the floodgates were being open. Except things fizzled out pretty quick.

All that despite Michael Saylor doing his best to evangelize the use of BTC as a treasury asset.

So what has been accomplished so far?

We can group institutional hodlers in four categories:

• The institutions that hold Bitcoins on behalf of other people in the form of some exchange traded product. Let’s call them ETF-like.

• The governments and in that bag we can include central banks or equivalents.

• Private companies.

• Public companies.

ETF-like products are easy to track. They are your typical mainstream financial product subject to a host of disclosure rules. We can list them all and know how much Bitcoin they control.

Public companies in most countries also have reporting duties regarding what assets they decide to put on their balance sheet. So while the amount of details we can get from documents such as SEC filings isn’t always 100% transparent, it is always enough to make an educated guess so has to how many BTC a public company has on their balance sheet.

Private companies is a totally different game. We know only about those that choose to be public about it. And we can only trust so much about the numbers they report. 

For governments it is even more difficult. For the most part they have zero reporting obligations. 

So you understand that by essence we have an incomplete picture of who owns what when it comes to institutions.