The strongest one is Google. And, you know, we’ve outperformed them anywhere by a factor of eight to 80, and we’re very pleased with that. But, of course, our primary strategy is a Bitcoin strategy. And so I think to understand why is MicroStrategy able to return 937% in a period when the S&P returned 52%. And, I think, we just have to start with the idea of what’s the right treasury strategy or how do you capitalize the company? And you can see if you capitalize the company on bonds, bonds have a negative 21% return over this time frame. Bonds have a negative real yield. They’re not returning the cost of capital. The best surrogate for the cost of capital, I think, is the S&P Index, the 52%. And so if you were able to capitalize your company on the S&P Index, you could maybe keep up with the cost of capital.
What you can see here is that, gold and silver don’t really work. As the money supply expands, the S&P Index tracks it and gold, silver and bonds underperform. NASDAQ is pretty close statistically. Why is Bitcoin better? Because MicroStrategy’s performance is really based on Bitcoin performance to start. And I think Bitcoin illustrates a couple of principles. One is, digital is better than analog. Bitcoin is digital property, and it’s digital. So Bitcoin is performing, because it’s digital in a world of digital transformation. I think the second thing it illustrates is a commodity is better than a security. And Bitcoin is an asset without an issuer, which makes it a global asset, and a security will never be a global asset because security has an issuer, an issuer is a company, and a company has a nexus and a country and has an operation.
So Bitcoin’s perform well because it’s digital, because it’s commodity. And, the third thing this illustrates is that a scarcity is better than a commodity. So the fact is, you know, Bitcoin is commodity, but it’s hard capped at $21 million and gold is not hard capped and silver is not hard capped. So commodities generally make very, very poor investments. The world has learned to invest in market baskets of securities like the S&P Index, but it would be the wrong lesson to say that therefore securities are better than commodities. Securities have their own risk factors. The right lesson to take away is that something digital is better than something analog. Something, scarce is better than something abundant, and something global is better than something local.
And Bitcoin represents all of those things. And the last four years, it has emerged in the Western world as that global digital scarce commodity, i.e., digital property. Now MicroStrategy, if it had just simply adopted Bitcoin purely, perhaps it would have had the same performance as Bitcoin. But how do we actually outperform Bitcoin? I think the key here is volatility is a benefit to us. And so we have harnessed volatility, and we’ve also harnessed our unique ability to issue securities such as convertible bonds. And the fact that we embrace the securitization of Bitcoin and we embrace the volatility of the asset class has given us the ability to raise capital, right? As you as you recall, we’ve raised billions of dollars of equity capital and billions of dollars of debt capital.
We wouldn’t have been able to raise as much capital without volatility, from and you could see with our convertible bonds, we managed to raise $3 billion in convertible bonds at substantially less than 1% interest. I mean, really about 50 basis points, 0.5% interest. So MicroStrategy’s performance is being driven by two things. First, we’re raising $3 billion at 0.5%, instead of paying a non-volatile interest rate. Non-volatile, you know, could be 8% to 10%. So instead of paying 8% to 10% interest, we’re paying 0.5%. So clearly, that’s a big performance boost to us. And the second is if we were non-volatile and we didn’t have an asset rich strategy, we couldn’t raise the $3 billion at all because, a lot of times senior debt would be capped at some EBITDA multiple of some sort.
So we would be — we would have access to a small amount of capital at a high cost of capital. So MicroStrategy has got a very low cost of capital and access to a lot of capital because of our particular strategy, but we’re capitalizing on what clearly is the best capital asset, Bitcoin, in the world over this period. And the combination of those two things is what catapulted us to that 937% performance. Let me go to the next slide now. I would say this quarter, the first quarter of 2024, it’s the end of the Crypto Childhood or the Crypto Cowboy era where you had had 15-years of lots of confusion, chaos, and jockeying of 1,000s and 1,000s of crypto assets. Well, Bitcoin is the winner and it is the one emergent institutional asset that has come out of that 15-years.
Bitcoin, Spot ETFs were approved in January of this quarter, and that was a very big milestone. And as we go into this next quarter, it’s pretty clear that Bitcoin is the only Crypto asset that’s going to be approved for sale in the form of a Spot ETF in the United States. And so Bitcoin is very unique. It is the one Crypto asset that has been embraced as an institutional asset. It’s the one Crypto asset that a publicly traded company can hold on its balance sheet, can capitalize upon. It’s the one Crypto asset that Wall Street firms are going to be able to sell on a spot ETF basis. The entire modern institutional asset economy, the options market, the securities market, the money manager system, the institutional mutual funds, the institutional ETFs, they’re all going to be centered around Bitcoin as the digital property going forward.
And so while we’re at the end of the beginning, you know, we’re now, I would say, at the beginning of the middle. We’re at the beginning of the stage of rapid institutional adoption of digital property in the form of Bitcoin. This chart shows that at the end of the first stage, Bitcoin is a bit more than a $1 trillion asset. And from this stage forward, it won’t really compete against other Crypto assets. It will compete against gold, art, equities, real estate, bonds, you know, and other types of store of value money, in wealth creation, wealth preservation and the capital markets. And, as you can see, if you look at this chart, you know, probably some number between 10% and 50% of all this wealth is really just pure capital. The use case is store of value.
Many people buy equities, real estate, bonds, and arts, and other monetary instruments as a store of value, just like they buy gold as a store of value. Bitcoin has digital property is a store of value, but it’s the emergent high performance, high volatility, high functionality, high utility store of value, and it’s global. So we actually think that it’s going to continue to grow from here. And this is kind of the second quarter of about a 40 quarter, Bitcoin gold rush where we are going to see Bitcoin embraced by more and more banks, more and more money managers, more and more nations. You’ll see more Bitcoin ETFs in Hong Kong and Australia. You’ll see more derivative products and other types of related products built on top of it, or you’ll see it built into more things.
