🪙 L₿E

This newsletter has previously spent considerable time on the concept of being early.

Short answer: It’s relative. 

Long answer: We’re still early.

Bitcoin treasury companies are all the rage, and they’re nowhere near their final form.

Not all are built the same, however. Not to mention, it’s tough to form an acronym around “Bitcoin treasury company” considering bitcoin itself has already taken “BTC,” Cory Klippsten, Swan founder, told Rizzo on today’s episode of Supply Shock. 

“I think the way that it's already been talked about on different websites and things, it's basically about companies that have bitcoin in their treasury, which is far more companies than the ones that are actually uniquely focused on accumulating more bitcoin through capital markets activities. And so there's a subset of companies that I would call ‘leveraged bitcoin equities,’ which is a term we came up with last year to distinguish between the two.”

So, all leveraged bitcoin equities (LBEs) are bitcoin treasury companies — but not all bitcoin treasury companies are LBEs. Strategy is an LBE, for instance, and it’s also a bitcoin treasury company. 

Tesla, on the other hand, is only a bitcoin treasury company, as is Marathon. Those firms have primary KPIs that aren’t solely related to treasury operations, Klippsten explained. 

Swan recently partnered with French semiconductor stock Sequans Communications to launch a $384 million bitcoin treasury initiative funded with debt and equity sales, and Klippsten told Rizzo that those buys start today.

And while Klippsten finds some of the handwringing justified, he reasons that it’s still far too early to be a doomer about the rise of LBEs.

“ If they don't reach scale and attract institutional flows, then yes, it is very similar to a penny stock or an ICO or something like that if they don't actually achieve scale,” he said. 

But in terms of where we are on the execution scale, many of the recently launched LBEs have yet to even start buying bitcoin. We’re still early.

“... the Tether-Cantor deal, they can’t buy yet. Nakamoto isn’t buying yet, so all of this stuff is TBD, and it hasn’t even kicked off yet in a big way.”

Catch the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and X.

— David

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• BTC/USD is working on another shot at $109,000, but has so far stopped short twice this morning.

• MetaPlanet is mulling the potential acquisition of “a digital bank in Japan and providing digital banking services that are superior to the services which retail now is getting,” CEO Simon Gerovich told Financial Times.

• Public companies now hold 857,322 BTC ($93.4 billion), according to BitcoinTreasuries.com. That’s 4.3% of the current supply.