MicroStrategy founder and executive chairman Michael Saylor says that Bitcoin (BTC) could soon become a “legitimate” treasury reserve asset for top US companies.
In a CNBC interview, Saylor says that new Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) rules for how publicly traded companies should report crypto holdings could speed up Bitcoin adoption.
The FASB is a US agency that determines how companies must report assets on their balance sheet. The new rules, which go into effect after December 15, 2024, will have companies that hold crypto report the “fair value” of the assets.
Explains Saylor,
“The real significance is that there are companies like Berkshire Hathaway and Apple Computer that have $100 billion-plus in cash, and right now they have to invest it in treasuries and sovereign debt. And with this change in fair value accounting you’re going to have a commodity that’s valued as fair value and it becomes a legitimate treasury reserve asset for publicly traded companies.”
According to the FASB, stakeholders said that the current rules, which require companies to account for the loss in value of their crypto holdings, but not the increases, do “not provide relevant information that reflects (1) the underlying economics of those assets and (2) an entity’s financial position.”
Says the FASB,
“In addition to better reflecting the economics of crypto assets, measuring those assets at fair value will likely reduce cost and complexity associated with applying the current cost-less-impairment accounting model for many entities.”
Saylor also says he believes that Bitcoin is part of an ongoing trend to digitalize various things that people use.
“We’re going through a digital transformation of everything. Apple represents a digital transformation of telephones and cameras and Google is the transformation of books and libraries. Bitcoin represents the digital transformation of capital. 99.9% of the capital in the world is tied up in real estate and stocks and precious metals and bonds. And so we’re .1% transformed.
People, as they get educated on digital assets, are realizing that they ought to be allocating more and more of their capital to this digital asset and so they’re moving from .1% to .2%. And I think that’s really driving the trend. I’ve said it before, if Bitcoin is not going to zero, it’s going to $1 million. The real question is, is it a legitimate asset? If it’s a legitimate institutional asset, everybody is under-allocated to it.”
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