Today: the management of several companies are surreptitiously parking part of their company assets in bitcoin – mostly in secret:
unbeknownst to most shareholders, companies, in particular listed firms, have been accumulating Bitcoin under the radar and in ways that wouldn’t attract regulatory scrutiny or require regulatory filings.
The secrecy is because, according to these CEOs and CFOs, the mainstream view of bitcoin is still one of an unreliable, volatile, renegade entity:
Ultimately these employee-CEOs have to tread a fine line.
Declare that their companies have Bitcoin on the balance sheet and risk shares of the firm riding along with Bitcoin’s volatility, distracting investors from the business case of the company, and drawing unnecessary focus to a firm’s balance sheet.
But don’t buy any Bitcoin and risk being fired when five years down the road the board of directors hauls in the CEO and CFO and asks them why they didn’t buy Bitcoin when they had the chance.
So what do they do? Use the same techniques as those described in the Panama Papers to hide cash from tax authorities:
Offshore entities and trusts own other offshore entities and trusts in a convoluted web of holdings that make it almost impossible to determine who owns what and how much what is owned is valued at.
To me the most interesting part is this:
in a Gartner Survey conducted last month, a full 5% of finance executives and CFOs surveyed said that they intended to acquire Bitcoin for their companies before the end of the year.
Which means that the number of such CFOs who are already doing this, in secret, may well be higher.
Finally, here is an attempt to catalog some major public and private companies that are known to hold bitcoin.
They include companies we have discussed before: the Canadian ETFs, Stone Ridge Holdings, whose management bought so much bitcoin they created tools for auditing and compliance that spun out into a new company, and of course Tesla and Square: