MicroStrategy announced on Friday that it bought just over $10 million worth of additional bitcoins, just days after finalizing another purchase of more than $15 million. However, the company’s share price shed more than 11 percent in today’s trades as of writing.
The Nasdaq-listed business intelligence firm, which has been doubling down on its cryptocurrency bet over the last year, paid an average price of $48,888 for each Bitcoin , including fees.
Its acquisition of approximately 205 bitcoins puts the Virginia-based company’s total holdings of the digital token at 91,064, which were acquired at a total cost of $2.20 billion and an average price of $24,119 per bitcoin. At the current price, Microstrategy’s bitcoins are worth more than $4.4 billion.
The business intelligence giant, Headed by crypto bull, Michael Saylor, had previously sold debts worth more than $1.2 billion for the explicit purpose of purchasing Bitcoin.
MicroStrategy has good reason to do that again. The publicly-listed company’s share price shot up by approximately 580 percent as MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin bet has turned into a profitable one. The price of Bitcoin rose from $11,000 in August, when it made its first crypto purchase via Coinbase’s institutional service, to just shy of the $60,000 level last month.
In 2020, the company bought an aggregate of 70,470 bitcoins, which were acquired at an aggregate cost of $1.1 billion or an average purchase price of $15,964 per coin, well below current levels.
For reference, MicroStrategy’s market cap stands at $5.8 billion as of Friday, meaning the company places nearly 70% of its net value in Bitcoin.
MicroStrategy CEO Saylor, who is now an avid bitcoin advocate, was said to be the one who convinced Elon Musk to move $1.5 billion dollars of Tesla’s funds into bitcoin. Although the big party started after the news of the Tesla purchase and its acceptance of Bitcoin as a form of payment, the electric vehicle maker was not the first heavyweight firm to convert a portion of its cash into bitcoin.
When a wave of institutional investors started to warm to Bitcoin through the second half of 2020, Payment Startup , Square and other Wall Street whales including Microstrategy adopted the policy of placing their cash surpluses into crypto.
