Bitcoin bull Michael Saylor took to Twitter just a few hours ago to announce that his publicly traded business intelligence firm Microstrategy has just acquired 229 bitcoins at an average price of $43,663 per bitcoin totalling $10 million. Per the latest BTC purchase, Microstrategy now holds 92,079 bitcoins, according to records from Buy Bitcoin Worldwide.
Saylor, who disclosed this round of purchase on Twitter and in a SEC filing on Tuesday, makes his firm the publicly-traded company holding the largest amount of BTC in their balance sheet. Since Microstrategy’s foray into bitcoins in the summer of 2020, it has invested a total of $2,251 billion in six trenches. Microstrategy’s May 18 bitcoin purchase comes five days after it announced its 5th BTC purchase, investing $15 million at an average price of $55,387 per bitcoin.
Effectively, Microstrategy’s 92,079 BTC holding is now $3,962,794,715 as of press time averaging $43,036 per BTC. Saylor’s company aggressive buying of bitcoins has shot the formerly obscured company into the limelight. Saylor, who has become a vocal evangelist of the largest cryptocurrency, had not shied away from putting his company’s money where his mouth is even when Elon Musk and Tesla revoked their support for BTC last week.
While the market continues in its bearish mode after series of tweets from Elon Musk citing not just environmental concerns of Bitcoin mining but also that the Bitcoin network is centralised, the overall cryptocurrency market cap has jumped upward by at least 5% within the last 24 hours and reaching $2.07 trillion from $1.95 trillion.
Not discounting the massive market selloffs within the last few days up to the tune of $400 billion, bitcoin’s recent woes doesn’t entirely stem from Elon Musk’s tweet tantrums. For a few weeks now, altcoins market cap has been growing fast, necessitating the gradual drop in Bitcoin market dominance to fall below 40% from roughly 70% at the start of the year. ETH continues to ape into BTC dominance, reaching 20% after breaking the $4,000 price mark in May.
Amidst the market dip and more than a 20% drop in bitcoin from its all-time high of $63,500 in April, public corporations like Microstrategy keep trying to shore up the crypto market with their bullish buying activities. On the other hand, Tesla who coincidentally comes second after Microstrategy with its 43,200 BTC holdings purchased back then in February but has since announced it will no longer support Tesla purchase through bitcoin. Nonetheless, Elon Musk made sure to inform the annoyed Bitcoiners that Tesla has not sold off its rest bitcoins since the Electric car company stopped accepting bitcoin as a form of payment. It had disclosed that it sold just 10% of its stash to test how liquid the Cryptocurrency market is. That sale would go ahead fetch it over $100 million profit.
As of press time, bitcoin price stood slightly above $43,200, a little below $43,663 Microstrategy’s latest bitcoin purchase price.