MicroStrategy Buys 51,780 BTC for $4.6 Billion in its Largest Purchase Yet

Nasdaq-listed business intelligence firm MicroStrategy has acquired an additional 51,780 Bitcoin for around $4.6 billion, at an average price of $88,627 per coin in the company’s largest BTC purchase to date.

According to data from BitcoinTresuries, MicroStrategy is now holding 331,200 BTC on its balance sheet bought for an average of $49,874. As Bitcoin is at the time of writing trading at $90,750, the firm is sitting on an unrealized gain of 82%, with its BTC stash being worth 30.08 billion.

MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin accumulation strategy has seen it become a crypto hedge-fund proxy in the eyes of investors, to the point its stock price often moves in tandem with that of the flagship cryptocurrency.

Its latest $4.6 billion acquisition occurred between November 11 and November 17,  and helped the company’s BTC yield reach 20.4% quart-to-date, and 41.8% year-to-date. In total, the firm spent around $16.5 billion in BTC.

The company’s Bitcoin Yield metric is used to measure how effective its BTC accumulation strategy is. Rather than representing yield obtained on its BTC holdings, it represents the percentage change in the ratio between its BTC holdings and assumed diluted shares outstanding.

In essence, a higher BTC yield shows the firm is acquiring Bitcoin at a faster rate than it is issuing new shares on the market, which means the amount of BTC per share grows. Its goal is to achieve an annual BTC yield between 4% and 8% over the next three years.

MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin accumulation

The Nasdaq-listed firm first started accumulating Bitcoin back in August 2020, when it purchased 21,454 BTC for around $250 million. The move made it the first publicly-traded company to adopt a Bitcoin allocation strategy.

Initially, MicroStrategy bought Bitcoin for around $11,600 per BTC, but kept on accumulating over time. In September 2020 it purchased 16,795 BTC for $175 million, while in December of that year it acquired 29,646 BTC for $650 million.

The $4.6 billion figure was its largest purchase to date, but the company has revealed plans to raise $42 billion over the next three years to keep accumulating the cryptocurrency.