🧠 Intelligent leverage

Ed Juline’s thesis: Bitcoin treasury companies are the bridge for corporate adoption because they can use cheap, conventional financing to accumulate more BTC per share than a retail holder can. 

On today’s Supply Shock podcast, Juline calls the Saylor playbook “intelligent leverage”: Issue debt today or preferred shares tailored for fixed-income buyers, buy BTC and let time do the work.

Juline has deep Bitcoin industry experience: prior executive positions at Bitcoin Conference, Marathon, Strategy, and now, Bitcoin Treasuries.

“As long as BTC appreciates in dollar terms 7% per year on average over a five-year period, everything on the back end is guaranteed,” he said of Strategy’s family of preferreds (the Stride/Stretch share variants).

Does a statement like that take conviction? Juline wouldn’t classify his relationship with Bitcoin as “belief.” 

“When you say I ‘believe in Bitcoin’ — and I hate it when people say ‘believe in Bitcoin’ — it’s not Santa Claus. When you know what Bitcoin’s going to do over the next five years, 10 years, whatever years, 7% is just a given.”

Still, Juline doesn’t subscribe to the idea that newer players — ETFs, institutions and treasury companies — are fundamentally driving the price of bitcoin.

“The ETFs [and the treasury companies] were a reaction to Bitcoin’s model, that the supply grows linearly for all intents and purposes. It tapers off. And so instead of us thinking that we can affect the price of bitcoin — yeah, in the short term we can, but in the long term, Bitcoin is going to do what Bitcoin does…keep producing blocks and the rest of us react to it.”

“And so whatever the next thing is, if it’s treasury companies or if it’s institutions, or if it’s sovereign wealth funds or if it’s retail again, they’re reacting to Bitcoin, not consequently affecting its trajectory.”

Full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and X.

This newsletter was created with assistance from AI tooling.

• Trump-backed bitcoin firm American Bitcoin Corp made its Nasdaq debut on Wednesday, reaching a high of $14.52 after opening at $9.22, per TradingView data. ABTC has since retraced to $6.83.

• US Bancorp is again offering bitcoin custody services to fund managers after a three-year hiatus.

• California’s $506 billion pension fund is debating whether to add bitcoin to its portfolio, considering it already held around $166 million in Strategy shares as of its Q2 disclosure (Decrypt).