In a wide-ranging September interview with Bitcoin Magazine, MicroStrategy executive chairman Michael Saylor condensed five years of corporate experimentation into a stark, almost mechanical blueprint for what he calls Bitcoin’s “endgame”: accumulate an unprecedented stockpile of the asset as digital capital, then manufacture a new tier of credit markets on top of it.
Saylor’s framing is deliberately elemental. He stitched BTC into a centuries-long lineage of civilization-scale energy breakthroughs—from fire and steel to petroleum and electricity—arguing that the asset’s monetary properties are best understood as a way to move economic “energy” across time and space at light speed.
“Bitcoin is hope because Bitcoin represents digital energy,” he said. “A way to convey energy through time, through space… the next paradigm shift.” To Saylor, the institutional misunderstanding of that shift is not a bug but the core of the opportunity. “I would say 95% of the decision makers in the finance world still don’t really embrace or understand the idea of digital energy,” he argued, adding that society’s digestion lag is typical of paradigm shifts: “Bitcoin is evolving faster than society can digest it.”
In Saylor’s model, the equity of a firm that repeatedly performs this cycle becomes “digital equity,” engineered to outperform the underlying asset through conservative leverage and tenor management: “If I want to create a company that’s going to perform 2x Bitcoin, I take the Bitcoin, I issue Bitcoin-backed credit… I create digital equity and the digital equity outperforms the underlying capital asset.”
He insists the competitive set is not other Bitcoin treasuries but the vast inventory of 20th-century credit—mortgage, corporate, and sovereign—priced off low or repressed yields and often secured by depreciating or illiquid collateral. “What they’re competing against is the existing credit instruments in the capital market,” Saylor said.
The pitch to savers is equally blunt: the “better bank” is one that strips out duration and pays a spread over the fiat status quo, funded by over-collateralized Bitcoin. He sketched it in operational terms: raise equity, buy Bitcoin, then sell short-duration, BTC-secured credit “that just strips the duration to one month… and give people 500 basis points more yield than the risk-free rate in the capital market where you’re selling the credit.”
The scale he envisions is not modest. Saylor walked through jurisdictions where financial repression or chronically low policy rates amplify the spread, arguing that mature markets with suppressed yields are the ripest soil for “pure-play digital credit issuers.” Switzerland and Japan were his canonical examples.
The rhetoric can be martial—Saylor calls it a “protocol war”—but his operational discipline hinges on avoiding the traps that wrecked miners in the last cycle. Short and expensive liabilities layered onto depreciating hardware was, in his view, the fatal mismatch. The treasury archetype he champions favors mid-to-longer duration capital structures tied to an appreciating base asset. “If you take a mid-duration or long-duration loan and buy an asset appreciating 30 to 60% a year, you’ll probably be fine,” he said, dismissing M&A diversification as value-destructive opacity compared to the “perfect partner” of simply buying more BTC at “one times revenue.”
For a community accustomed to debating halvings, hash rate, or on-chain heuristics, Saylor’s endgame centers elsewhere: indexes, coupons, tenors, and yield curves—all re-denominated atop a new monetary base. It is a corporate finance thesis at Bitcoin’s core. And it doubles as a provocation to boards and CFOs in every currency regime: “For every company in the world in any capital market, they’re always better off to buy Bitcoin as their capital asset,” he said. The rest is execution at scale. “Get to a trillion dollars of collateral growing 30% a year, be issuing $100 billion of credit a year, growing 20, 30% a year,” Saylor concluded. “We’re building a better bank.”
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $116,492.
