A report released last week by auditing firm Deloitte shows that blockchain is increasingly becoming a major pillar for businesses to stay competitive with 73% of the respondents in the report noting concerns about their firms losing a competitive advantage without blockchain adoption.
What’s more, 81% of the surveyed financial services believe that blockchain technology has already achieved mainstream adoption and that the novel technology underlying cryptocurrencies is “broadly scalable.”
The survey by Deloitte covered executives in the financial service industry, including executives from Singapore, South Africa, United States, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, and United Arab Emirates. Out of the cohort respondents, 97% opined that “blockchain applications are crucial for their business to stay competitive.”
A Growing Bullish Trend
The survey reflects a growing bullish trend among publicly traded companies towards digital assets and their underlying technology.
Just last year, there was a seismic shift in perspective in the global financial ecosystem towards cryptocurrencies and blockchain with MicroStrategy leading the wave as the first publicly listed company to buy Bitcoin.
Championed by its CEO Michael J. Saylor who has been open about his bullish stance on Bitcoin, the Nasdaq-listed intelligence company purchased more than 20,000BTC at the time.
MicroStrategy has since accumulated a whopping 105,000 BTC worth approximately 4.8 billion at today’s price. Since the founding of the company Saylor has remained MicroStrategy’s CEO becoming the primary reason why the company has bought so much BTC.
In one of his posts on social media, Saylor opines that he owns 17,732BTC, which he bought at an average price of $9,882.
“I informed MicroStrategy of these holdings before the company decided to buy Bitcoin for itself” Saylor adds.
To date, Saylor continues to make bullish moves on BTC, even announcing the company’s move to sell up to $1B in stocks just to buy more BTC.
Following this bullish trend, Jack Dorsey’s Square (a digital payment service) also made a huge move earlier on in 2021 to purchase $170 million worth of BTC. Square’s purchase of 3,318BTC was an additional buy from its October 2020 purchase of 4,709 BTC bringing Square’s total BTC holding to 8,027.
Although not quite as bullish as MicroStrategy, Square’s move is built on a belief that cryptocurrencies are instrumental towards economic empowerment as they lower the barriers of entry for those alienated from participating in the global economy.
According to Square’s CEO Jack Dorsey, “the investment is part of Square’s ongoing commitment to Bitcoin”
In an interview with CNBC, Dorsey also said that “the company plans to assess its aggregate investment in Bitcoin relative to its other investments on an ongoing basis.”
How investors should prepare
Throughout the world, the aftermath of 2020’s wave of inflationary measures across central banks is starting to manifest. In the US, inflation hit a 13 year high driven by a 5.4% rise in the cost of consumer products.
“Inflation is cancer that has been killing civilization throughout history. Bitcoin is the cure.” Opines Saylor in a tweet.
In one of his many interviews, the American entrepreneur and business executive note that “the world is waking up to the fact that bitcoin is a digital property on an open monetary network.”
“That’s pretty profound because it’s going to spread to billions of people on the planet” he adds.
