Phong Le: Inside Strategy's 2026 Roadmap, USD Reserve, MSCI Inclusion and STRC's 10.75% for Everyday Savers

**Phong Le** (0:00)
Everybody, no matter how rich or poor, or whether you're Democrat or Republican, should have a good return for the money that they save. Good is not 0%. Good is not the rate of inflation. Good is above the rate of inflation. So if it's 10 and 3 quarters percent, so be it, right? Like everybody should have access to that.

**Natalie Brunell** (0:25)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Thanks for joining us. Here with me this week is Phong Le. He is the CEO of Strategy. Phong, thanks so much for having me at your headquarters. Great to see you.

**Phong Le** (0:34)
Thanks for coming and visiting us here.

**Natalie Brunell** (0:36)
I feel like we have a lot to talk about. So let's start with some topical things. Market sentiment has been a little bit bearish lately, but I can't think of a company or a group of people more bullish than the folks at Strategy. So talk to me about your reaction to really the negativity that we've seen surrounding Bitcoin and the lackluster price action.

**Phong Le** (0:58)
You know, Bitcoin as a, call it 50 vol, 50 AR asset, gets a lot of attention when it goes up. It seems like the world is beautiful, everybody's happy, and when Bitcoin goes down, even if it's 10% and stays at a certain level, the bottom is falling out. It's the beginning of the next four-year cycle, Bitcoin winter. So, I'll start with it's very much sentiment-driven. As a long-term investor, as someone who's buying and holding Bitcoin, ideally for eternity, you have to have a long-time horizon. And as I've told others, the fundamentals of the market this year for Bitcoin couldn't be better. And so, I try not to think too much in the short term. In fact, what you really want to do when you think about what to do with Bitcoin in the short term, you should be fairly methodical and mathematical about it, which is why we focus on things like MNAB, why we built out the Bitcoin Treasury, why we built out the US Dollar Treasury. And in the long term, you think about the fundamentals of Bitcoin. And as you know, they really couldn't be better. We're sitting here 10 miles from Washington, DC. And Washington, DC is fully supportive of Bitcoin like it's never been before. Mike and I have been traveling to visit many, many different traditional finance banks. He was in the Middle East. I was all across the US. We were together in New York City. And traditional finance now is trying to figure out how do they catch up and keep their assets on platform, which means giving people that access to Bitcoin on platform. And so if you think about what's happening with traditional powers of the world, the US government, the US banking system, they're all getting on board with Bitcoin. And that's extremely bullish for this year and 2026
Why the price action does what it does is sometimes hard to explain. But when you're an investor, you think about the long term of the asset class.

**Natalie Brunell** (2:55)
You and Michael Saylor have been visiting these big banks, right? We keep seeing these tweets, guess the bank. Some of them we can guess pretty easily. What exactly are you doing there? What are the conversations like? And does it have anything to do with what Michael recently said on stage in the Middle East, which is about digital money?

**Phong Le** (3:11)
Yeah. There are multiple. If you start with, they're all trying to catch up with just the base of cussing Bitcoin and providing exchange services for Bitcoin. They've seen, for an example, Coinbase or Fidelity and what they're doing. And they want to be able to offer their customers native services with Bitcoin so they don't take the money off platform out to somewhere else. So I'll just start that as a baseline, I'll call it a checkings account and a savings account for Bitcoin. And then on top of that, what do they want to do? Then they want to offer things like Bitcoin lending, which means you get loans against Bitcoin. And we know a lot of folks are doing that on a one-to-one private loan basis, but they should provide it in general. Perhaps offering instruments that give you yield off of Bitcoin, that will be the next sort of step above that. And then a set of Bitcoin backed products, not too much different than what we do. An investment bank would want to be able to underwrite Bitcoin backed securities like MSTR or like any of our preferreds. That would be a next step. And then you get into offering digital credit, right, which would be our preferreds or a bank preferred based off of Bitcoin. And then the last thing, which is what Mike talked about at Bitcoin Meet in the Middle East, which is digital money.