North Rock Digital Founder: MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin Tactic is a “Joke”

Enterprise business intelligence (BI) software vendor MicroStrategy has made headlines with its recent Bitcoin purchases. The company has purchased over 140,000 Bitcoin (BTC), making it one of the largest holders of the cryptocurrency. However, not everyone thinks this is necessarily a good thing for the company.

Hal Press, the founder, and CEO of cryptocurrency-focused investment fund North Rock Digital has voiced concern over MicroStrategy’s large purchases of Bitcoin. In a series of tweets posted on April 8, Press stated that it was “comically stupid” to leverage a software company to this end.

Press argued that every single one of MicroStrategy’s coins would eventually need to be sold and that when the time came, it would be a “career-making short.” He ridiculed the strategy of leveraging a software company to run a “Bitcoin acquisition strategy,” stating that it was “so comically stupid it’s actually quite funny.”

Press insisted that his view “genuinely isn’t a comment about Bitcoin,” but rather a critique of leveraging a public company to acquire any asset that does not add value to its core business. However, he did admit that there is a chance that MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin purchases could be profitable.

MicroStrategy’s executive chairman and former CEO, Michael Saylor, is a vocal Bitcoin enthusiast and led the company to adopt the Bitcoin strategy back in August 2020. Saylor has hailed Bitcoin as an “economic engine based on a truth machine poised to emerge as a freedom machine.”

At press time, Bitcoin was trading at $28,373, up 1.59% on the day, and MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin holdings were worth close to $4 billion. Despite the criticism, the company’s Bitcoin strategy has continued to generate significant interest in the cryptocurrency community.