Most of the wealth is really store of value or its useful capital. And so, as that narrative shifts from digital currency to digital property and from medium of exchange to store of value. Past criticisms are becoming irrelevant. And now if you look at bitcoin as a digital gold, as gold, it can be 10 times what it is, and as property it could be 100 times what it is. And we don’t need to address any of the traditional currency criticisms or medium of exchange criticisms. In fact, one could say simply as a store of value, there’s no reason why bitcoin can’t continue to outperform and can’t become 100 times what it is. And these ETPs that have been released are doing a tremendous job of scaling bitcoin as a store of value, because they’re putting it within the grasp.
You can buy $100 worth of it in millions or 10s of millions or 100 millions of accounts with one-one hundredth of the friction — perhaps one-one thousandth of the friction that traditional investors faced just a few years ago when they had to go set up a crypto account on a crypto exchange. And then they had to figure out who their bitcoin custodian is going to be or whether they’re going to do self-custody. And there are large classes of investors and institutional investors that either can’t or won’t do that. So we’re living through a very exciting period. Now we can go to the next slide. The question is, what’s micro strategy going to do in order to support the bitcoin network, in order to benefit our shareholders from these trends? Well, as you can see, and as we’ve said, we view ourselves as a bitcoin development company.
And what does that mean? Well, that means we’re going to do everything we can to grow the bitcoin network. We’re going to do everything we can to acquire more bitcoin. And we’re going to do everything we can to benefit our shareholders and do this in an creative fashion. And when we consider our options and our unique strengths, we boil it down to four. First of all, our company structure. We are unique as an operating company. And that means we have active control over our capital structure. And we can do things operating companies can do that trust companies like, say, Spot Bitcoin ETPs, they can’t do. And that’s a wide range of things. One of those things is, we can develop software. And of course, we’ll continue to develop business intelligence software.
There’s extraordinary opportunities to blend artificial intelligence with our traditional business intelligence customer base. It’s great value. And we will also continue to pursue bitcoin development opportunities. So develop applications that create value from the bitcoin network, either working on the base layer or working with L2 protocols like the Lightning protocol in order to do this. We’re very enthusiastic about that. And as we develop this software, we will release it either to the benefit of the bitcoin network or we’ll release it to generate more revenue and work to generate more cash flow so that we can buy more bitcoin. Another thing that we can do uniquely as an operating company is, we can generate cash from operations. There are lots and lots of ways to generate cash from operations, too many for me to enumerate right now.
As Andrews pointed out, we’ve reinvested $726 million in cash to date in the bitcoin network. We expect to continue to be able to reinvest cash into bitcoin acquisitions. And when we do this, this is, we believe, very accretive to our shareholders. And the last point that I would want to make is, we’re very fortunate to be able to leverage the capital markets. There really are no companies that have, to the extent that we have, been able to leverage the capital markets to acquire bitcoin. We have acquired bitcoin with senior secured debt issuance. We have acquired bitcoin with convertible debt issuance. We’ve acquired bitcoin with equity issuance. And those are just three ways we’ve done it in the past. And as we look forward, we’re going to consider all possible capital market opportunities.
So perhaps preferred equity would be a route for us to acquire bitcoin with leverage that’s beneficial to our shareholders. Perhaps other types of equity would be or continued equity like we have with our ATMs, perhaps convertible debt, perhaps structured notes, perhaps secured debt or perhaps unsecured debt. We try to evaluate all options, we keep our options open, and we ask ourselves the question, is this prudent? And then also, is this accretive? Is this going to be good for our shareholders? And of course, with any discussion of leverage, we don’t want too much. We want to just pick just the right amount of leverage, the leverage that allows us to benefit our shareholders without creating undue uncertainty. So this is an ongoing opportunistic exercise of ours quarter by quarter.
And of course, every single quarter we expect the bitcoin market, the capital markets, the debt markets will evolve. And so, we pride ourselves on being nimble and being able to take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves as we did in Q4 with our equity issuance. Sometimes it’s appropriate to go fast. Sometimes it’s appropriate to go slow. Sometimes it’s appropriate to do nothing and wait for better opportunities to present themselves. The nice thing about our situation right now is that, we have all these options and we believe we’re structured very, very well to take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves in the bitcoin era of institutional adoption that we see over the coming 15 years. It won’t be like the first 15 years, but we believe it will be a healthy growth period presenting many, many opportunities for corporations such as ours as more and more institutional investors and retail investors become aware of bitcoin and as regulatory clarity spreads everywhere in the world.
And with that, I guess I’d like to pass the floor to Shirish for questions.
A – Shirish Jajodia: Thank you, Michael. We’re going to jump into the questions. And the first question is for Phong. Phong, if you can elaborate on the company’s new positioning as the bitcoin development company? And does this mean any different allocation of R&D? And will you be allocating more R&D into Lightning and Layer 2 applications? If you can elaborate a little more on that.
Phong Le: Thanks, Shirish, and thanks for the question. I think our press release and our prepared remarks, and Mike actually did a really nice job of explaining our positioning as a bitcoin development company. We thought long and hard about the positioning and the right words to describe our unique value proposition. I suggest everyone take a quick look or a long look at that. On the R&D piece, we will invest more in R&D into bitcoin software development. It will not be at the expense of our business intelligence and AI and cloud-based software development. Some of the things that we’ve been doing, you’ve seen at our Bitcoin and Lightning for Corporations MicroStrategy World event last year, where we implemented a Lightning Rewards program on the Layer 2 network.
We’re also looking at some things that will leverage the native bitcoin blockchain technology, some security applications that we’ll reveal at our next MicroStrategy World Conference. So we’re excited about bitcoin overall, but very excited about some of the software development capabilities that we’ll be able to create coming out of it.
Shirish Jajodia: Great. The next question is for Andrew. You talked about excess cash and leverage, highlighting the value proposition for MicroStrategy. How do you plan to acquire more Bitcoin in 2024?
Andrew Kang: Thanks for the question. I think Michael summed it up really well in the last few minutes of his remarks. I believe we have all options available to us, which includes excess cash, but also all the different forms of capital that we could issue through debt and equity markets. I think as we’ve done in the past, those are the levers that we’ll use to acquire more bitcoin. I think 2024 will offer some opportunities for us to do so. I think as our market value increases with the increasing price of bitcoin, I think there will be additional opportunities to access the capital markets. And similar to what we’ve always said, we will look to assess which is the most accretive. We’ve issued debt in certain markets, we’ve issued equity in different types of markets.
I think we’ve demonstrated the track record of our ability to think through those complex ideas. And so as Michael alluded to, I think we have all of those options available to us to acquire more bitcoin in 2024.
