When a company calls itself the “central bank” of a decentralized asset designed to eliminate the need for central banks, you know the irony budget has been exceeded. But Strategy CEO Phong Le isn’t joking.
In a CoinDesk podcast recorded on August 10, Le declared that Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, functions as Bitcoin’s central bank. The reasoning: with 840,447 BTC on its balance sheet, valued at roughly $53.3B, the company is the second-largest Bitcoin holder on the planet, trailing only the pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
The numbers behind the claim
Strategy’s Bitcoin stash now represents more than 4% of Bitcoin’s total supply. The company has executed over 100 separate BTC purchases since it first started buying in 2020. That accumulation spree has transformed what was once a mid-tier business intelligence software firm into the largest institutional Bitcoin holder in the world, surpassing even BlackRock.
Le, who joined the company in 2015 and has served as CEO since 2022, has overseen a significant portion of this accumulation. His trajectory through the C-suite, from CFO to COO to the top job, mirrors the company’s own metamorphosis from enterprise software vendor to what it now bills as the world’s first and largest Bitcoin Treasury Company.
