Is the Saylor Playbook Cracking? Bitcoin's Biggest Buyer Just Became a Seller

**Jennifer Sanasie** (0:00)
On today's Public Keys at the New York Stock Exchange, a stablecoin consortium knocks Circle off its footing. Securitize goes public, and Bitcoin ETFC another week of outflows. I'm Jen Sanasie. Let's get into it.
Happy Monday, everyone, and happy fourth. A lot to discuss after a long weekend here in the US. Joining me to kick off the show today is Two Prime CEO and founder, Alex Blume. Hey, Alex.

**Alex Blume** (0:30)
Jen, good to be with you.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (0:32)
Thanks for being with us.
We're coming back from the long weekend with Bitcoin sitting at around $62,000 this morning. Talk to me a little bit about how you're watching the asset as we get the week kicked off.

**Alex Blume** (0:46)
Yeah, I think there's both a qualitative and quantitative lens to it. On the qualitative side, all eyes are on strategy and they're shifting, meandering policy decisions. And did they buy Bitcoin? Did they sell Bitcoin?
That looks like the major risks of strategy unwinding look to have ceased for the time being. And I think that gives some mental and psychological relief to Bitcoin holders and believers. On the technical side, looking at things like high volatility and futures funding rates, which all point to kind of a neutral-ish market right now. People aren't overly frightened. It's not trending negatively, but it's also not booming and hot to the upside either.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (1:26)
Let's talk about strategy for a second. Right before we started the show, I saw that they announced they sold 3,588 Bitcoin to fund dividends on its preferred stock. Talk to me a little bit more about your outlook on strategy. I know that you have been cautious and you've been very public about outlining the risks for investors.

**Alex Blume** (1:47)
Look, I'm not a big fan of strategy when it comes to the health and quality of Bitcoin. I think in many ways strategy represents almost every exact opposite feature of what Bitcoin is. It has a charismatic leader, it has shifting policy, it's subject to investor pressures and personal incentives rather than a public neutral asset. It's had to abandon the policy that's stated in the past like not selling Bitcoin in order to stay afloat.
It's like Bitcoin's become in a way hostage to strategy, Michael Saylor's buying activity. I will say right now because of all the turbulence, their stock down, stretch, not performing at par at $100, that they're largely sidelined from buying Bitcoin for the time being. They've been buying so much Bitcoin that sidelined, no buying actually means there's not a lot of buying behavior in the Bitcoin market at large. Now, this past week, we saw that they actually sold Bitcoin to pay the debt on their various converts and debt products and preferred equities. To me, it's okay, so strategy sidelined, they're not buying. Maybe that's a good thing that we're not beholden to this one company. At the same time, it makes you ask, well, who is buying Bitcoin and what is the catalyst for upside at this point? I think passage of the Clarity Act could be one upside catalyst, though it's not definitively something that leads to Bitcoin buying day one. It just clarifies some rules for the SEC and CFTC as well as stablecoin rulings.
The technical set up alone, if Bitcoin can break out of this range to the upside, I think a lot of momentum and trend traders might think, oh, this is a good time to get in, Bitcoin is bottom, that leads to the time being. Then I think a lot of what strategy is doing is maybe trying to set up getting credit worthy enough to be included in the S&P 500, which would have index inclusion that would kind of make people a forced buyer strategy, which would allow strategy to perhaps buy more Bitcoin in the future. Maybe we could start this whole messy process again of strategy dominating the Bitcoin market, but that's what I'm looking at presently.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (3:53)
Well, you mentioned that strategy is the biggest buyer of Bitcoin, at least it was, it seems like that's caused now. How do you think Bitcoin breaks away from the strategy narrative?

**Alex Blume** (4:05)
I think that it's going to be perhaps more incremental with groups like BlackRock telling their investors to put 1% or 2% of their portfolio into Bitcoin. I think expansion of Bitcoin into broader use cases, I see it being combined with mortgages, Block is working to make it a true payment rail, and just inclusion in more financial products as it makes its way into the mainstream economy. That's not an overnight success, but it may gradually just build up and buy Bitcoin for the market as time goes by.