Recently, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor made headlines again costafter it was revealed that the value of Bitcoin in his personal fortune exceeded 1 billion dollars. This announcement re-invigorated the debate surrounding bitcoin ownership, especially in the case of large institutional, public companies. MicroStrategy’s obsession with bitcoin is well-known, as they have steadily increased their bitcoin holdings since 2019.
In this article, we will find out who currently owns the bitcoin stock based on publicly available information.
Bitcoin ownership by category: Who owns what?
Let’s start by breaking down bitcoin ownership by different categories. Of the maximum 21 million bitcoins, approximately 2,609,343 BTC are held by various ETFs, countries, public companies, private companies, bitcoin mining companies, and DeFi platforms.
More than 1,057,839 BTC belong to the ETFs category, which is almost 5.037% of the maximum supply limit of BTC. Thus, this category leads the list in terms of bitcoin holdings per category. It is followed by the category of countries with 2.58% (539,182 BTC), and the third place on the list is the category of private companies with 2.502% (525,474 BTC). The public company category holds only 330,862 BTC, which is only 1.576%. DeFi platforms and bitcoin mining companies own only 0.743% and 0.256% of bitcoins respectively.
The largest public companies by bitcoin holdings
Now comes the interesting part. MicroStrategy holds nearly 68.45% of all Bitcoins held by the public companies category, representing at least 226,500 BTC of the 330,862 BTC in the entire category.
So the category of publicly traded companies owns 1.576% of the total BTC supply, of which MicroStrategy alone owns at least 1.079%. Marathon Digital Holdings is second in the top list by Bitcoin holdings, with only 20,818 BTC (0.099%). Tesla Inc, Hut 8 Corp, and Riot Platforms Inc are the others on the list. THE Coinbase and Galaxy Digital Holdings are also on the list with a percentage share of 0.043% and 0.039% respectively.
As mentioned earlier, MicroStrategy clearly dominates the public company category with 68.45% or 226,500 BTC. Marathon Digital Holdings Inc, although second on the list, still only has a 6.29% share of the total BTC holdings within the category. The shares of Tesla and the others are even poorer than this. None of the companies on the top ten list exceeds the 3% limit for the category within the category, with the exception of MicroStrategy and Marathon Digital.
Largest private companies by bitcoin holdings
Here we can clearly see that, unlike in the category of publicly traded companies, there is no dominance of the largest player. The difference between the number of bitcoins held by the top ranked private company and the second ranked is only 60,000 BTC. Mt.Gox is at the top of the list with about 200,000 BTC, and Block.one, the second on the list, has 140,000 BTC. Tether Holdings LTD, Xapo Bank and BitMEX other important companies on the list for Bitcoin ownership. Tether Holdings LTD has about 75,354 BTC, while Xapo Bank and BitMEX have 38,931 BTC and 36,794 BTC respectively.
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