Study Shows 19 Companies Have Over $6.5 Billion in Bitcoin

An analysis by Nickel Digital Asset Management, investment manager reveals that 19 listed companies have $6.5 billion invested in Bitcoin, originally spending $4.3 billion buying their cryptocurrency.

What companies are investing in Bitcoin?

While seven companies made their Bitcoin purchases in 2002, as many as eight new entrants including Tesla have allocated to Bitcoin in just the first four months of 2021. While Tesla later suspended acceptance of Bitcoin as a means of payment, it remained invested in it.

There is a notable US and Canadian bias in these allocations, 13 of the 19 are US and Canadian companies, three are European, one is Turkish, one in Hong Kong, and one is Australian. Nickel’s analysis reveals a further 17 companies have purchased Bitcoin, without revealing the full details of their portfolio composition at this stage.

Further analysis by Nickel reveals a staggering $43.2 billion worth of Bitcoin is held through various Bitcoin close-ended trusts and exchange-traded products. These investment funds hold them on behalf of their clients, including a range of retail investors, asset managers, and increasingly, institutional asset allocators.

The geography of these funds exhibits a similar strong North American bias, with US and Canadian funds accounting for an overwhelming 65% of the above holdings. Nickel earlier this year with institutional investors and wealth manager across Europe who collectively manage over $110 billion in assets, revealed that over the next two years 81% expect to increase in corporations using Bitcoin for their treasury reserves, with 29% expecting to see dramatic growth in this trend.

Anatoly Crachilov, co-founder and CEO of Nickel Digital said “A growing number of corporations have recently made significant multi-billion allocations to Bitcoin as part of their treasury reserve strategies. This, coupled with a confirmed inclusion of crypto assets in the portfolio construction by leading global asset managers such as Paul Tudor Jones, Bill Miller, Ruffer, and Guggenheim Partners, is a very important endorsement for Bitcoin’s emerging functionality of the hedge against inflation.”

“The COVID-19 crisis and the expansionary monetary policies implemented by the central banks in response to the crisis have dramatically changed the outlook for fiat currencies, heightening the risk of currency debasement. This, coupled with the increasingly inflationary guidance by Fed and an ever-expanding pile of $18 trillion of negatively yielding global bonds, has encouraged many corporations to contemplate an allocation to alternative assets.”

“Bitcoin is a unique non-discretionary asset, with monetary policy hard-coded on the base protocol level, without anyone’s ability to inflate or alter the number of units in circulation. It offers important attributes of an immutable and verifiable supply, with a transparent and predictable issuance schedule. Furthermore, it is designed with important deflationary characteristics, whereby its supply predictably decreases by 50% every four years (through the process known as “halving”). This makes it an appealing anti-inflationary asset for many corporates and asset managers alike.”

“The crypto assets space remains volatile as it is going through the early stages of an adoption curve. However, increasing allocations by large-scale institutional and corporate players is expected to lead to a reduction of this volatility over time, thanks to a longer-term, stickier type of capital brought by those investors, as well as a much larger liquidity pool of crypto ecosystem.”