Michael Saylor speaks on stage during Bitcoin Conference 2023 at Miami Beach Convention Center on May 19, 2023 in Miami Beach, Florida. Photo by Jason Koerner/Getty Images for Bitcoin Magazine
Getty Images for Bitcoin Magazine
During a keynote at the Bitcoin MENA conference in Abu Dhabi, Michael Saylor described a financial design that moves beyond MicroStrategy’s well known bitcoin strategy. He outlined a three layer system built on bitcoin as a reserve asset, a corporate credit layer created by his company, and a final layer of digital money that banks or exchanges could issue on top of it. The structure resembles a private monetary stack rather than a simple treasury position, and a shift from the cypherpunk themes that shaped Saylor’s early framing of bitcoin.
Saylor began by describing bitcoin as digital property and as the foundation for an entire credit system. He explained that his company now holds about 660,000 bitcoin and told the audience they are currently acquiring between $500 million and $1 billion of bitcoin each week.
“We can buy more Bitcoin than the sellers can sell. We are going to take it all. We are going to take it out of circulation.”
The next step in the structure is the creation of corporate credit instruments backed by bitcoin. The aim is to transform bitcoin’s volatility into predictable cash flows that institutions can use. Saylor said “If you have a long time horizon, you should take the 30% annual appreciation in bitcoin, but most people do not want 30% with thirty volatility. They want 10% with ten volatility.”
The credit layer therefore acts as a bridge between bitcoin’s long term performance and institutional demand for stable yields. In traditional finance this type of bridge is created by banks and bond markets. In Saylor’s design it is created by a corporate balance sheet that holds bitcoin as its reserve.
The final component of the system is the creation of what he called digital money. Saylor described how a one dollar instrument can be constructed using the company’s short duration credit product, currency equivalents, and a cash reserve that ensures the value remains constant. He told the audience that such a product would “trade like a stablecoin” and could offer “an 8% tax deferred yield.” As he told the audience, ‘the biggest idea is to create digital money.’
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Although Saylor never used the word stablecoin, the structure he outlined mirrors one in every functional respect. He described a $1 unit whose value is held steady through daily adjustments to a reserve composed of short duration bitcoin backed credit, currency equivalents and cash. He told the audience it would “trade like a stablecoin,” which places it in the category of synthetic dollar instruments used in digital finance. The distinction lies in the collateral, instead of short term government securities, the reserve would be built on corporate credit instruments backed by bitcoin.
Banks, asset managers, and exchanges could then offer deposit accounts using this instrument. In his words, “Satoshi created the capital. The treasury company creates the credit. The bank or crypto exchange creates the money.”
Slide from Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin MENA keynote showing possible forms of digital money.
Bitcoin Magazine
This architecture marks a clear departure from the cypherpunk narrative that shaped Saylor’s early public advocacy. In the first years after MicroStrategy adopted bitcoin in 2020, he described bitcoin as a form of digital property that strengthened individual sovereignty, protected private ownership, and empowered people through self custody.
His more recent language positions bitcoin as the raw material for a layered financial system built by a single corporate issuer. It is a move from the decentralised ethos of early bitcoin to the language of structured credit, yield engineering, and monetary design more commonly associated with traditional finance.
This type of instrument would not fit within the new U.S. stablecoin framework. Under the recently enacted GENIUS Act, only insured depository institutions or permitted payment stablecoin issuers can create dollar stablecoins, and they must be fully backed with cash or short term government securities. The law also bars issuers from paying interest or yield to holders solely for keeping a payment stablecoin on deposit. A synthetic $1 product built on corporate bitcoin backed credit and promising an 8% return would fall outside that model, making it unlikely that such a product could be issued from the United States.
History provides examples of private actors who accumulated such large reserves of a monetary resource that they moved into roles resembling monetary authorities. The British East India Company began as a trading enterprise but eventually controlled taxation, military operations, and money issuance in parts of India. Courts of the era treated it as a sovereign power because its economic weight gave it sovereign-like influence.
An earlier case comes from West Africa in the fourteenth century. Mansa Musa controlled gold mines and trade routes across the Mali Empire. When he travelled through Cairo, the volume of gold he distributed increased the money supply so rapidly that local prices shifted for years. Neither actor set out to become a central monetary force, both shaped financial systems because they controlled the underlying resource.
This context gives new weight to how Saylor introduced his keynote. He described travelling through Dubai, Bahrain, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi and meeting regulators, sovereign funds, banks and family offices. He said he wanted to present “what we are proposing to the sovereign wealth fund, the hedge funds, the investment funds, the family offices, the banks, the traders and those running the government.” For a product that cannot be issued in the United States, a region that is actively positioning itself as a global hub for digital assets becomes a natural locus for the type of monetary infrastructure he outlined.
These examples show how centralisation of a monetary base can alter the structure of a market even without explicit political authority and they also highlight a pattern. Systems become more fragile when they centralise reserves, credit creation, and liquidity in a single balance sheet. Diversified systems distribute risk, centralised systems concentrate it.
Bitcoin was engineered to avoid this problem, its issuance is fixed and its network is decentralized. Its value is verified by thousands of independent nodes. The credit formation that grows above it is meant to be competitive and distributed and Saylor’s design operates differently. It uses bitcoin as the foundation for a corporate version of a central bank. The company holds the reserves, issues the credit, and articulates a blueprint for money instruments that others may distribute. This does not change the Bitcoin protocol, but it creates a centralized financial layer on top of a decentralized base.
Slide from Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin MENA keynote showing possible forms of digital money.
Bitcoin Magazine
Saylor’s engineering is sophisticated and ambitious. It mirrors features of traditional central banking, but without the formal authority of a state. It merges bitcoin with structured credit and proposes a synthetic form of digital money backed by corporate assets rather than government bonds. It is a vision of bitcoin that is less about peer to peer monetary autonomy and more about institutional liquidity, yield curves, and the construction of a new financial center.
Whether this structure becomes part of a future global financial system will depend on regulatory environments and the willingness of institutions to rely on a single issuer for their monetary instruments.
In Abu Dhabi his message departed from the individual sovereignty and self custody focus that shaped his early advocacy. Bitcoin was presented as the reserve asset for a corporate credit engine capable of issuing its own forms of money. It is an evolution from cypherpunk principles toward a traditional financial architecture built on top of bitcoin rather than alongside it.
As bitcoin integrates with mainstream finance, will the systems that grow on top of it reflect its decentralized origins, or will they recreate the forms of centralisation that bitcoin was originally built to challenge?