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Strategy Pivots on Selling Bitcoin
Strategy, the world’s largest holder of bitcoin after Satoshi Nakamoto, gave an earnings call this week in which CEO Phong Le stated,
“We will sell Bitcoin when it's advantageous to the company”.
One long-term aim of this is to increase BTC per share, and Michael Saylor also explained that,
“You buy Bitcoin with credit, you let it appreciate, and then you sell Bitcoin to pay the dividend”.
This might seem like an innocuous part of Strategy’s financial engineering, allowing not only for dividend funding, but also for tax and balance sheet optimization, except that Strategy’s public position up to now has been to diamond-hand its BTC forever.
At the least, it’s an ideological pivot–from never sell to sell when advantageous–and we also end up in a situation where BTC is sold to pay dividends on a stock instrument that itself was sold in order to buy BTC.  It may be that we’re watching Strategy bump up against its own structural constraints, although this can be interpreted more positively as the company simply repositioning its BTC as a more flexible asset.
Ultimately though, Strategy is tasked with balancing three duties: Paying STRC dividends, ensuring that MSTR holders don’t take the hit on STRC payments, and maintaining the image of a diamond-handed BTC custodian.
It’s a tightrope act (on a unicycle while juggling) but don’t forget that Strategy's entire BTC plan is predicated on one assumption: that over time, the price of BTC goes up. If they’re right about that, then the market will cut them enough slack.
Anthropic Makes Google and SpaceX Deals
Google is close to becoming the most valuable company in the world, thanks to news that Anthropic has committed to spending $200 billion for access to Google’s cloud servers and chips..
The deal was reported in The Information, which also detailed that Anthropic’s spending will extend over a period of five years, starting in 2027. Google parent company Alphabet’s market cap has subsequently risen to $4.8 trillion, while Nvidia is still on top at $5 trillion.
Remarkably, planned spending from Anthropic and OpenAI combined now accounts for $2 trillion of revenue backlog across Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle, while Anthropic now accounts for 40% of Google’s cloud revenue backlog.  It was also announced yesterday that Anthropic has struck a deal with SpaceX to gain access to SpaceX’s Colossus I data center, which includes over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. Relatedly, an Elon Musk reply on X states that xAI is to be dissolved, with its products to become SpaceXAI, under SpaceX.
HIP-4 Can Be Huge for Hyperliquid
Hyperliquid last week launched HIP-4, and the numbers so far are constructive. In case you missed it, HIP-4 is a new primitive allowing for onchain outcome contracts, which initially means prediction markets.
Hyperliquid can then compete with Polymarket and Kalshi, but HIP-4 actually goes beyond just this use case, and also opens the door to “bounded options-like instruments” (in Hyperliquid’s words), and other applications.
As for the numbers, the first week of HIP-4 trading (contracts on BTC price movements are currently active) saw $10.4 million in volume, with over 4,000 unique traders, and 92% of trades below $1,000, so this is retail-driven activity.
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