The NASDAQ is up 17%. As you recall, we had to choose between gold and digital gold in August of 2020. And we chose digital gold that is Bitcoin, the actual gold is down 2%. So 192% versus minus 2%, is the difference, between choosing the right asset and the wrong asset. This totally makes sense, because we’re living in an age of digital transformation and there’s just a growing awareness that Bitcoin is the digital gold of the 21st century. Silver is down 18%, and that time period, and of course, bonds, which we were holding on our balance sheet, are down 24%. And we had a concern about holding bonds, because of the interest rate environment. That’s why we wanted to buy some other tangible asset. As you can see, Bitcoin is almost the opposite of bonds.
Bitcoin being, the accreting asset, bonds have been diluted to balance sheets, so we’re holding them. MicroStrategy has outperformed all the big tech companies. And you can see here, Google, Microsoft, Apple Meta, and some of the big techs haven’t even had a positive return in that time period. And MicroStrategy has almost 3x, the next best competitor in the enterprise software space. So I would say based upon this over this time period that, our Bitcoin strategy is working. In essence, we have transformed a company with a 500, a $500 million enterprise software company into a new kind of firm that has both a $500 million software business as well as a now a $5 billion plus digital assets business. And we’re able to get benefits from both the business intelligence part of our business, as well as the Bitcoin part of our business.
We can go to the next slide now. One of the things that’s coming is, is more different options for institutional investors to get Bitcoin exposure. And oftentimes, people ask us, so what’s the difference between MicroStrategy and just buying the Bitcoin outright? Or buying a Bitcoin futures ETF or buying grayscale or buying a potential spot Bitcoin ETF if and when they’re available. And so, I think this chart is both useful to – useful to explain what makes MicroStrategy different. And you can also see in this chart, the structural reasons why we are able to outperform Bitcoin itself over this last three-year time period. If you’re an investor, and you’re looking for accessibility to Bitcoin as an asset class MicroStrategy is a ticker on NASDAQ MSTR.
Whereas buying the Bitcoin itself as the commodity requires that you set up a new relationships with a crypto exchange and a crypto custodian and oftentimes investors just don’t have those exchange and custody relationships. So it’s not so easy to buy the underlying Bitcoin and in some cases, it’s just not practical or not possible at all, that they wouldn’t be allowed to do it, or they wouldn’t have the mandate to do it. The futures ETF does provide that accessibility. The spot ETFs have not been available up until now. And of course, GBTC has been an over the counter product, and there are many institutional investors that struggle with over the counter aspects of access. So, that’s been a benefit to us. The second differentiator has been our operating company structure.
We are we are an operating company that is providing Bitcoin exposure. We’re not a finance company. And that means we have some options. One option is we don’t charge a fee. So if you’re an investor in MicroStrategy, you don’t get charged an annual fee or some sort of custody fee in order to be invested in our company. We cover the cost of custody using our operating cash flows and other cash flows from the operating business. If you were to buy Bitcoin itself, you normally have to place it with a custodian of your institutional investor, and so all institutional custodians charge a fee. There is an annual fee to invest in futures ETF as well. There will be fees to invest in spot ETFs and there has been a fee to invest in GBTC. So the ability to get Bitcoin exposure and not get charged a fee is another plus for us, a differentiator.
The third differentiator is as an operating company, we can acquire Bitcoin with cash flows and we can organically accrete more Bitcoin. And we can do the cash flows, so we can do it with accretive financings of different sort, either accretive debt or accretive equity financings. And that’s a plus. And these other options don’t allow you to organically accrete Bitcoin. So that’s another plus for institutional investors that are Bitcoin involves. The fourth differentiator is that as an operating company, we can use intelligent leverage. We can do asset-backed financing. We can do convertible financing. We can do senior secured debt financing. We could set up credit lines. So a lot of things an operating company can do that an ETP can’t do. And of course, if you’re just holding the underlying Bitcoin and a custodian, the Bitcoin is not going to leverage itself.
And there really isn’t, you don’t have those sort of types of debt financing you can do against Bitcoin, a commodity right now as an institutional investor. So that has been a nice differentiator for us. And we have used that in order to create a product which is not just a straight Bitcoin investment. The $2.2 billion of debt with a 1.6% blended interest rate is an example of intelligent leverage. The fifth differentiator is that we have a non-Bitcoin business that we operate our enterprise software business. And we’ve been in that business for 30 years. And so, we’re not just a pure Bitcoin play, but we provide some downside protection because we’re able to rely upon cash flows and operating income from the enterprise software corporation.
