Half of World’s Largest Companies Will Have Bitcoin on Their Balance Sheet by End of 2021, Says Pierre Rochard

Kraken’s Bitcoin strategist Pierre Rochard believes BTC will see an explosion of corporate interest in 2021.

In Kraken’s 2021 market outlook presentation, the crypto influencer predicts 50% of the top 500 companies in the world will hold Bitcoin in their portfolios by the start of 2022.

“My boldest prediction is that if we take the S&P 500, the world’s largest corporations, I think that by the end of 2021, more than half of them will have Bitcoin on their balance sheet, and I think that will be driven by simple economics, which is that issuing shares to buy Bitcoin causes your stock price to go up more than the dilution.

And so because that is the case – we have market data showing this – we’re going to see a huge amount of corporate adoption of Bitcoin, and we’ll even see like what [MicroStrategy CEO] Michael Saylor is doing, corporations issuing large quantities of bonds, fixed-income instruments – whether they’re convertible or whatever – in order to just bulk buy Bitcoin.”

Rochard’s prediction has perhaps already started to play out in 2020 with business intelligence firm MicroStrategy’s seemingly endless quest to acquire Bitcoin and payments giant Square’s colossal Bitcoin purchase this past October.

In an interview with Real Vision, the Bitcoin strategist elaborates on his outlook, saying he foresees a future in which people begin to refuse fiat payments in deference to Bitcoin.

“So the way the sound money drives out a bad money is what’s called Thiers’ law. And Thiers’ law is actually the inverse of Gresham’s law. And Thiers’ law, really the practical implication of it is that eventually, the recipient of the payment – not the sender, the recipient of it – is going to refuse fiat. 

They’re going to say, I don’t want USD. I want Bitcoin. Because if you give me USD, I know that it’s going to lose its value very quickly. And so I want you to pay me in Bitcoin. And so, really, it doesn’t actually matter whether the sender is sending them USD or Bitcoin.”

As it becomes the standard for companies like MicroStrategy to convert their USD earnings into Bitcoin, says Rochard, there will be wider industry adoption of the top crypto asset to the extent that it will become a legitimate form of payment.

“And so I think that as more and more companies join the Bitcoin standard and start using Bitcoin as their treasury reserve asset, then they will want to get paid in Bitcoin so that they avoid the transaction costs of having to convert USD into Bitcoin. And so really, this is why people say we have to have store of value adoption before we have medium of exchange adoption.”

Featured Image: Shutterstock/Gonin