Well, the annual gathering brings together the top fintech leaders in the world.
I spoke to Michael Saylor, executive chairman of strategy, to get his take on the company's credit rating as well as price target for Bitcoin.
Take a look.
Welcome to FinTech TV.
I'm Remy Blair.
We're here at Money 2020 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I am joined by none other than Michael Saylor, executive chairman of strategy.
Michael, great to have you here.
Thank you so much for making time for us.
Yeah, happy to.
Well, you're joining us on a big day for strategy.
First and foremost, S&P Global ratings issuing a rating.
So what was your initial reaction to that?
Well, we're really exciting, excited.
It's an auspicious day for the entire industry because we're the first Bitcoin Treasury company to ever get a credit rating from a major credit rating agency.
And um our initiative this year is the launch of 4 digital credit instruments, and now that we've got an S&P credit rating, that's going to open up pools of hundreds of billions of dollars of capital that otherwise wouldn't be able to buy those credit instruments.
Yeah, and Michael, we're keeping a close.
I on the crypto market in particular, the price of Bitcoins.
So get your take in terms of price target, what you expect, uh, year end and also beyond.
Well, the general consensus of all the equity analysts, uh, that cover our company, and there's quite a few of them, is about $160,000 by the end of the year.
Our, our company's guidance is based on $150,000 end year price for Bitcoin.
Yeah, and Michael, today is orange dot day.
So I understand 390 Bittoy buys, which is $43 million and that brings your total up to 640,800 Bitcoin.
So tell us more about this purchase.
Well, we've now accumulated a bit more than 3% of the Bitcoin network or the final supply.
Um, we every week we we try to make progress by stacking more Bitcoin.
This is pretty exciting that we're able to continue to do this, and what was special about this week was that Bitcoin was all acquired with credit instruments.
There was no equity sold in order to buy that Bitcoin.
So our long term plan is to sell billions, tens of billions, and then hundreds of billions of dollars of digital credit that's backed by Bitcoin to buy the Bitcoin.
And um this last week was a pretty successful one in that regard, we think it'll continue.
Yeah, and when we take a look back at 2025, it's been a big year for crypto, whether we're talking about products launched or what we're seeing in the ecosystem in terms of innovation, but also in terms of regulation and as we're talking, the US government shutdown does.
Continues.
So what do you expect in terms of the legislative landscape as we headed to 2026?
Well, I think we're all looking forward to the Clarity Act, which will provide regulatory clarity for the entire digital assets ecosystem.
But I think with regard to Bitcoin, the exciting thing is the embrace of Bitcoin by most of the major banks.
I think we're we're seeing all the large banks on Wall Street like JPMorgan, like Wells Fargo, like Bank of America, like Citi, like BNY Mellon, they're all starting to take it very seriously and start to extend credit against Bitcoin or Bitcoin derivatives and the like.
So I think that banking acceptance of Bitcoin will be the real story over the next 12 months and that's what kind of.
Puls the industry to new all-time highs.
Yeah, and finally, Michael, before I let you go, I do want you to leave our audience with a positive as well as negative, perhaps, depending on how you look at the October 10th, October 11th, the liquidation that we saw in crypto.
But also, as we look ahead, there are so many innovations that are taking place and we're hearing about them right here at the conference.
So what did you make of that event we saw earlier in October?
What are you looking for?
I think Bitcoin is a very volatile asset, maybe the most volatile asset, because it's the most useful one.
It's the only one that you could sell with 50X leverage on a Saturday morning and buy back on a Sunday morning, uh, once your mood had turned.
And because there's so much leverage and so much utility in the asset, it means that it's, it's the deepest pool of liquidity, the deepest, uh, supply of credit.
In the world that's going to cause it to remain volatile because it truly is a global capital market, but because it's that volatile, it attracts huge pools of capital and they're all bidding the price up.
That's why the asset is outperforming the S&P and will continue to outperform the S&P.
To the indefinite future.
Yeah, and one thing I just thought of, this is my last question to you.
What is a question that you wish journalists would actually ask you?
What's the most exciting thing that uh most exciting utility the Bitcoin offers to the world?
I think it's digital capital, which means that it's going to be the basis for an entire digital transformation of the credit markets.
There's $300 trillion of credit instruments and typically people are getting 0.5% from their bank account or 1 or 2 or 3% from a money market.
I think the credit instruments built on Bitcoin will pay 2 to 4 times that much.
So it's going to reinvigorate Social Security, it's going to be reinvigorate pensions.
It'll save the insurance companies.
How would you like to have a bank account to pay you 20% instead of 2%?
Right, you can't do that on conventional traditional collateral assets, but using Bitcoin as digital capital, you can create an extraordinary digital credit instruments that are 234 times better than everything else, and I think that's incredibly compelling to the world.
Well, Michael, great to have you join me here in Las Vegas at Money 2020 and hopefully you'll be joining us again and we can discuss this further.
Thank you so much for your time.
I'll look forward to it.
Thank you.
