Bitcoin Treasuries

[fillippone]

I have a feeling it won't be that informative. Financial statements are generally stated in fiat terms.
<…>

Researching for this thread I read a few balance sheets.
In all of them the valuation of Bitcoin is converted in fiat terms, to be added to the other items in the balance sheet, but in many of them there is also an explicit mention of the overall number of bitcoins held.
So, yes, generally financial statements are interesting, as they generally reports both values.

[verita1]

I've been following Michael Saylor the Founder of Micro Strategy on Twitter and saw his tweet last month. I had the feeling that something very good was coming for Bitcoin and I think we are witnessing it.

On September 14, 2020, MicroStrategy completed its acquisition of 16,796 additional bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $175 million. To date, we have purchased a total of 38,250 bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $425 million, inclusive of fees and expenses.

https://twitter.com/michael_saylor/status/1305850568531947520?s=19

There have been several circumstances that have allowed Bitcoin to show a rise in price for a few days. I believe that Bitcoin is reaching maturity and there will be better performance in the times to come.

[Karartma1]

Another corporation is doing the 'treasury' thing
https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/1318873763073708040

Mode Global Holdings PLC, a U.K-listed company, has announced it will place 10% of its cash reserves into bitcoin as part of its treasury investment strategy.

@fillippone, not sure if you have seen it on the WO but it might be added to the list. Just be careful as kurious gave a hint that being a CoinDesk story we do not yet know how much 10% of their treasury is worth, might be even £10.
Real question is, how many companies till end of year on your sheet? 

[fillippone]

Hi, fillippone

I found some interesting material for your theme: https://ecoinometrics.substack.com/p/ecoinometrics-october-12-2020

<...>

Thank you mate.
The point is that there is a big circular reference: the source of this material is bitcointreasuries.org, the same of my thread here, even if I corrected some factual errors and reclassified the result. The only thing is the visualisations.
I might include some kind of visualisation in the spreadsheet, if you think it is worth. But I think my thread on Grayscale and BTCP now thank them quite effectively with some nice graph.

References:

Everything you wanted to know about Grayscale BTC Trust but were afraid to ask!
ETC Group to launch bitcoin ETP on Deutsche Boerse

[fillippone]

So, as Ratimov suggested, I added to the spreadsheet a couple or graph:

	BTC Holdingin Public Listed Companies	BTC Holding in Publicly Traded Funds

No major differences between the Source Graph on Ecoinometrics.

	BTC Holding vs MKT Cap

A couple of considerations here:

• There is a difference between out Graph and the one on Ecoinometrics: galaxy digital seems shifted on the left. But it looks correct in my opinion
• With this visualisation we can appreciate how low the investment made by Square is. Definitely pocket money, and a lot of room to improve with future investments.
  

[tranthidung]

I think you can count for the weights of companies with their marketcapitalization for this graph. The bigger market capitalization, the potential bigger effects from news with their buy or sell bitcoin with their portfolio or reserved asset.

My 2 cents fil.  

[bitmover]

Shouldn't Binance, Bitifinex and Bitman be included in that list?

I believe they hold considerable amount of bitcoins. But I couldn't find how much

[fillippone]

Shouldn't Binance, Bitifinex and Bitman be included in that list?

I believe they hold considerable amount of bitcoins. But I couldn't find how much

I don't think so.
Exchanges hold many bitcoins, of course, but they hold those coins acting as custodians of their clients.
So while those coins are technically their coins ("not your keys, not your coins"), there is also a custody contractual agreement with their clients.
All this to say I would say the ultimate legitimate owner of those coins are the clients, as the exchange cannot freely dispose of those coins.

This is a graph from Glassnode showing exchange balances:


Link

I think you can count for the weights of companies with their marketcapitalization for this graph. The bigger market capitalization, the potential bigger effects from news with their buy or sell bitcoin with their portfolio or reserved asset.

My 2 cents fil. 

Interesting: how would you visualise that?

[tranthidung]

Shouldn't Binance, Bitifinex and Bitman be included in that list?

It is not the purpose of this thread IMO and fil. already explained it.

I believe they hold considerable amount of bitcoins. But I couldn't find how much

Besides the glassnode site, you can get some data from there https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html. Of course you need to play with raw data and make your own analysis then charts. I am not sure about validity of the third party data.

Interesting: how would you visualise that?

Stay tuned. I will give you update when I have connection to my dataset. 

[bitmover]

I don't think so.
Exchanges hold many bitcoins, of course, but they hold those coins acting as custodians of their clients.
So while those coins are technically their coins ("not your keys, not your coins"), there is also a custody contractual agreement with their clients.
All this to say I would say the ultimate legitimate owner of those coins are the clients, as the exchange cannot freely dispose of those coins.

While they hold coins of their clients, they also have coins on their own. Nobody can open  an exchange without owing some bitcoins.

Additionally,  binance receives a % (paid in btc) of every bitcoin trade. So, they certainly hold many bitcoins which are not their clients. But how much? You cannot check that in the site provided by tranthidung.

I will see if I can find something and post here. But they certainly own a lot of bitcoins.

Birman is not an exchange,  and as miners they certainly own some btc as well.

Edit: Every company listed in stock exchange has to publish their balances and other data to investors. I don't think binance has any kind of obligation to make that data public, but there might be something. Sadly, I wasn't able to find in binance website.

[tranthidung]

But how much? You cannot check that in the site provided by tranthidung.

I said above: that site can be used as source for double checking from your own. And the validity of data, especially how they identify and label wallets are unknown. You can run your analysis with this data and compare it with glassnode. If your result is almost similar, it means double checking has good result (as expected).

About exchanges, they have cold and hot wallets. With cold wallets, we don't know what they actually plan to do with such (if they don't publicly report it). Without details, it is odds to imagine or assume what exchanges are doing and with how much bitcoin in hands for specific purposes.

[SquallLeonhart]

Definitely a great topic to see how the world of big finance companies are approaching bitcoin and the charts are easy to understand and just numbers and how much they have it, so it is really not that hard to see there is some interest. However I would love to see like a graph of interest towards bitcoin as well, like how many bitcoin treasuries was there 10 years ago (probably none) and with Winklevii twins probably considered to be the first big entry from rich people, from that day towards today how did it moved?

I feel like there could be this spike and crash in 2017 peak times, which I don't know if there were or not, that could change a lot of stuff on how we look at today as well. Do you know if you could find that or not? If you could that would be awesome to see.

[bitmover]

I found something.
It is very hard to find detailed information about binance. It should be more open

But I was able to find this:


https://6e8fa0cf-c67f-401d-93d1-8eafaa5249fb.filesusr.com/ugd/c5315e_cdb0fe68a66e4dbebf736bbbc7c98d68.pdf

In 17, 18 and 19 binance had a total volume of 681 billion USD in BTC.
The lowest fee possible is 0.012%.




The minimum BTC received, just in fees, in USD value is 80,172,000. If we convert that value to btc (at 10k USD rate, and it was much lower than that) we have more than 8,000 BTC.

I am not considering withdrawal fees, and BTC average price in 2017 to 2019 was lower than 10k USD. But we can have some idea of how much binance holds in btc. Certainly thousands. Those are not custodial BTC.



Additionally, i found this as well:



https://finance.yahoo.com/news/binance-recorded-time-high-spot-101011644.html

Their volume is going up. We can see (by the previous chart) that about 60-70% of that volume is BTC. So, just in 2020, it probably earned at least more 5k btc to their private holdings. Just in trading fees.

I said above: that site can be used as source for double checking from your own. And the validity of data, especially how they identify and label wallets are unknown. You can run your analysis with this data and compare it with glassnode. If your result is almost similar, it means double checking has good result (as expected).

The problem is that the website you provided include all BTC, and most of it is BTC from their clients. They are just custodial agents of those btcs. They do not really own them, like the trading fees btc.


Edit: Sadly I couldn't find any audit on coinbase/binance. An audition would "prove" how much btc do they really own, how much USD etc.

[FullNode]

Code:

Company Name			     Symbol	      Market Cap   % BTC   Purchases/Filings		      Basis Price USD     Today's Value	        Bitcoin	   %
MicroStrategy inc.	         US  NADQ:MSTR	   $1,577,426,368    33%   250M Aug,175M Sep 2020, Learn How	✓$425,000,000	   $525,773,025	      38,250 BTC .182%
Galaxy Digital Holdings	         CA  TSX:GLXY	     $303,994,558    75%   $134M on Jun-30-2020			✓$134,000,000	   $228,879,651	      16,651 BTC .079%
Square inc.		         US  NADQ:SQ	  $70,956,199,471   0.1%   50M,Bitcoin Investment Whitepaper	 ✓$50,000,000	    $64,728,501	       4,709 BTC .022%
Hut 8 Mining Corp	         CA  TSX:Hut-8	     $119,947,680    34%   Q2 2020				 ✓$36,788,573	    $40,604,798	       2,954 BTC .014%
Voyager Digital LTD	         CA  CSE:VYGR	     $386,662,227   4.4%   March 31 2020			  ✓$7,927,182	    $17,030,922	       1,239 BTC .006%
Riot Blockchain, Inc.	         US  NADQ:RIOT	     $175,144,336   8.3%   $7.2M on Jun-30-2020			  ✓$7,200,000	    $14,474,222	       1,053 BTC .005%
Bit Digital, Inc.	         US  NASDAQ:BTBT     $170,426,104   7.7%   Sept 2020				 ✓$10,080,000	    $13,148,814	       949.5 BTC .005%
Coin Citadel Inc	         US  OTCMKTS:CCTL   Not on G.F. ◥      -   December 2015 report			    ✓$184,390	     $7,104,024	       513.0 BTC .002%
Advanced Bitcoin Technologies AG DE  ABT:GR	    Not on G.F. ◥      -   Q1 2018				  ✓$2,117,978	     $3,515,232	       253.8 BTC .001%
DigitalX			 AU  ASX:DCC	      $33,944,831     9%   215 BTC 2019				    ✓$874,835	     $2,977,320	       215.0 BTC .001%
Hive Blockchain			 CA  CVE:HIVE	     $161,420,200     2%   Report			         ? $2,927,883	     $2,927,883	       211.4 BTC .001%
Cypherpunk Holdings Inc.	 CA  TSX:HODL	       $6,311,650    58%   $1.63M on Jun-30-2020 +60BTC		  ✓$1,630,000	     $3,650,333	       263.6 BTC .001%
BIGG Digital Assets Inc.	 CA  CNSX:BIGG	      $36,464,330     6%   SEDAR Reports			  ✓$1,071,904	     $2,007,960	       145.0 BTC .001%
Argo Blockchain			 UK  LSE:ARB	      $21,197,000   8.2%   September 2020			  ✓$1,340,000	     $1,744,848	       126.0 BTC .001%
FRMO Corp.			 US  OTCMKTS:FRMO    $270,031,000   0.3%   March 21, 2020		           ? $870,208	       $870,208	        62.8 BTC .000%
Block.one			 US  private 		private	       -   Profile			     ? $1,938,720,000    $1,938,720,000	     140,000 BTC .667%
The Tezos Foundation		 CH  private		private	       -   Sep 2020			       ? $343,541,184	   $343,541,184	      24,808 BTC .118%
Stone Ridge Holdings Group	 US  private		private	     80%   Oct 2020 Ann. BTC @ NYDIG	        ✓$115,000,000	   $150,790,872	      10,889 BTC .052%
Grayscale Bitcoin Trust		 US  OTCQX:GBTC	   $7,781,023,000    81%   Info on AUM and Reports OCT 9th	$6,322,124,376	 $6,322,124,376	     456,537 BTC 2.17%
CoinShares / XBT Provider	 EU  COINXBT:SS	      Not on G.F.      -   Info on NAV and Reports OCT 9th	  $770,170,932	   $965,621,040	      69,730 BTC .332%
3iQ The Bitcoin Fund		 CA  TSX:QBTC.U	     $141,415,900    81%   Info on NAV and Reports OCT 9th	   $91,189,025	   $114,869,160	       8,295 BTC .040%
ETC Group Bitcoin ETP		 DE  BTCE:GR	      Not on G.F.      -   Info on NAV and Reports SEP 4th	   $56,721,505	    $72,219,522	       5,215 BTC .025%
21Shares AG			 CH  multiple	      Not on G.F.      -   ABBA.SW, ABTC.SW, HODL.SW,              $41,392,073	    $41,392,073	       2,989 BTC .014%

https://bitcointreasuries.org/

I've seen your spreadsheet, good job.
I have inserted the complete list in the OP of my thread, I paste the content here in case you need any data,

Stronger

Grayscale Trust sees largest-ever weekly inflow, nears 500K BTC in total
Grayscale is on track to control 5% of the entire Bitcoin circulating supply by the end of 2021 with a record $215 million inflow last week.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/grayscale-trust-sees-largest-ever-weekly-inflow-nears-500k-btc-in-total

[exstasie]

Their volume is going up. We can see (by the previous chart) that about 60-70% of that volume is BTC. So, just in 2020, it probably earned at least more 5k btc to their private holdings. Just in trading fees.

I'm sure Binance owns plenty of BTC. They collect it on every ALT/BTC trade and there's no way they liquidate everything to fiat. CZ surely owns a large cache of BTC himself. He is a billionaire and I'm pretty sure most of his wealth is in crypto.

There's no point trying to deduce their holdings this way though. Without any other information, as one of the biggest exchanges in the world, the vast majority of Binance's coins should be assumed to be held in custody. We also have no idea if they truly keep their own value in BTC (they could be liquidating collected fees on an ongoing basis), although they probably do.

Edit: Sadly I couldn't find any audit on coinbase/binance. An audition would "prove" how much btc do they really own, how much USD etc.

I don't think there is a single exchange being publicly audited. Is there? We just take Coinbase's word about their holdings.

[bitmover]

Stronger

Grayscale Trust sees largest-ever weekly inflow, nears 500K BTC in total
Grayscale is on track to control 5% of the entire Bitcoin circulating supply by the end of 2021 with a record $215 million inflow last week.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/grayscale-trust-sees-largest-ever-weekly-inflow-nears-500k-btc-in-total

As far as I understand,  grayscale trust is holding those bitcoin as a custodial service as well.
So, those are mostly clients btc.  Just Like an exchange


Edit: let me be more clear
Whe  you visit https://grayscale.co/bitcoin-trust/ you can see the trust fund details
You can buy one share of the fund and you will own 0.00095 of their btc per share.

So they do not own that btc. They are just the custodial service. Exactly like any exchange. But you have some benefits(like security due to SEC regulations ) for a 2% annual fee.

Shares Outstanding    505,389,000‡
Bitcoin per Share    0.00095315‡

[jaysabi]

There is one thing I'm curious about it and it might be interesting to observe, that's if the info will be available which it should in my opinion.

With all the news about PayPal, I was wondering about something, Revolut offers currently the same thing as PayPal will do at the start and they claim they are holding the equivalent of your bitcoins with their custodian. But Revolut is a privately owned company so they don't have to publish any data about this, Paypal, on the other hand, is a public company so not only can they be audited but they are also as far as I know bound to make an annual report on their business.

Does that mean that at the end of the year we're going to be able to see how much BTC are they holding for their customers?
This is going to be pretty interesting, if it's like that can we expect this to happen at the end of 2020?

I have a feeling it won't be that informative. Financial statements are generally stated in fiat terms. All of the cryptocurrencies Paypal holds would probably be lumped together in fiat terms under a line item like "intangible assets." Apparently that's how Square is reporting their holdings, although I'm not 100% clear on the accounting nuances involved. https://www.forbes.com/sites/shehanchandrasekera/2020/05/21/how-are-cryptocurrencies-classified-in-gaap-financials/#50d7b93565b2

The financial statements, perhaps not if they lump it into intangible assets. My suspicion is that they will break it out as a sub-line under this though.  If they don't do this, there will be other reports where they spell out specifics on what they hold filed with the SEC (if they're a public company) because they're still under obligation to report information investors would find material to the business, and if they're holding a lot of btc that would qualify.

[davinchi]

It is also a private choice for each company as well, there is nothing that stops them from showing how much bitcoin they have neither. I do not mean showing as a proof in a blockhchain wallet signed with their code so that we would know they actually own it, that is not required for many institutional investor because it is not really a big deal for them.

I mean showing as in actually writing the amount of bitcoin in the financial statement at the end of the year, there is nothing stopping them from doing that if they want to, they could also ignore it and just write something else and try to go around the subject if they want to as well. However I feel like most of them already talked about how much they bought and how much they made, so I assume some of them would definitely give exact bitcoin numbers as well while others will probably stay away from that.

[fillippone]

Square Cash App sold a record Amount of Bitcoins during Last Quarter:

Square reports $1.63 billion in bitcoin sales for the third quarter via its Cash App

• Square said Thursday that sold $1.63 billion in bitcoin through its Cash App during the third quarter of 2020
• The gross profit figure was $32 million for the period, per the firm’s Q3 data release
• In Q2, Square made $875 million in bitcoin sales revenue and posted $17 million of bitcoin gross profit

It's a lot of bitcoins!
Some back on the envelope calculation can be found here:

[FullNode]

3iQ’s Bitcoin Fund Seeks to Sell up to 1M Unit on Canadian Exchange
The fund managed by 3iq is selling up to 1,050,000 Class A units to raise approximately C$25.2 million or roughly

https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/3iqs-bitcoin-fund-seeks-to-sell-up-to-1m-unit-on-canadian-exchange/