$BMT

Public Market Comps

Circle was not the first crypto company to outperform. Most famously, Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy (d/b/a Strategy) has, in recent years, become a bitcoin holding company with a rump software business. Currently, Strategy holds 592,100 bitcoin, valued at approximately $62 billion, compared to about $460 million in annual revenue from its legacy business lines.

Strategy is a publicly traded company, allowing retail customers with brokerage accounts to purchase its stock and gain exposure to bitcoin. In theory, its market cap should be the sum of (1) the value of its bitcoin, plus (2) some de minimis premium for the rest. Generously, this might be $66 billion. But in reality, its market cap is $101 billion, prompting commentators to suggest that “the U.S. stock market will pay $2 (or more) for $1 worth of crypto.”

Circle’s business model involves buying conventional vanilla financial assets (mostly short-dated U.S. Treasury bills) and then issuing cryptocurrency — roughly the opposite of Strategy — but it may benefit from the same premium.#Write2Earn