Michael Saylor: Biden’s Executive Order Akin to POTUS Giving ‘Green Light to Bitcoin’

MIAMI — MicroStrategy (MSTR) CEO Michael Saylor and ARK’s Cathie Wood gave a number of reasons for why they think bitcoin will continue to gain adoption and increase in price in a chat at the Bitcoin 2022 conference on Thursday.

——–Speaking to a packed house of the bitcoin faithful who gave the pair a standing ovation at their introduction, Saylor and Wood laid out several political and technological reasons for their optimism about the world’s biggest cryptocurrency.

On the political front, Saylor, whose company owns roughly $6 billion worth of bitcoin, said President Biden’s recent executive order directing various federal agencies to coordinate their approach to regulating the sector amounted to the “President of the United States giving a greenlight to bitcoin.”

“If I scan the last 100 years of history [and ask] when was the last time the President of the United States directed the government to embrace a new asset class, the answer is never,” Saylor said. He described the order as Biden telling different U.S. agencies to “get educated on bitcoin and figure out how to get it incorporated into the government.”

Wood agreed that there has been growing political support for bitcoin in the U.S.

“You’re seeing the politics around bitcoin changing radically because it has become the single issue that some people are voting on, and this is becoming bipartisan,” said Wood, who envisions bitcoin reaching $1 million by 2030.

Wood did sound one note of political caution, however, pointing to China’s strong support of blockchain several years ago, only to eventually ban much of the activity around it in favor of their own CBDC.

“I don’t hear talk about that here and haven’t heard much talk about ‘hey, this is going to displace the dollar as the reserve currency of the world,'” said Wood. “That’s very good we’re not hearing that kind of rhetoric here. But I’m sure as the elections evolve, someone will raise that as an issue.”

As for the technological forces driving adoption, Saylor and Wood pointed to the growing number of platforms integrating the Lightning Network as improving bitcoin’s usefulness as a medium of exchange.

“I think every crypto exchange, if they’re going to remain viable and competitive, they need to build Lightning into their exchange,” said Saylor, citing Kraken and Cash App’s recent announcements about incorporating the Lightning Network.

Wood was similarly sanguine about the rapidly growing payments technology.

“I think we’ll see an explosion of developers focused on Lightning Network,” said Wood. “This will be the missing link in terms of use case. Store of value – it’s always been there [for bitcoin]. But means of exchange and unit of account now have much a better opportunity for bitcoin to dominate long term.”

Saylor said he thinks bitcoin’s real potential will be realized when billions of people around the world have a mobile phone and an app with a Lighting wallet, and that wallet has some bitcoin on it as a store of value, and some USD or digital euro or Chinese digital yuan on it as a medium of exchange.

“Then you’ll see tens of trillions or hundreds of trillions of dollars all moving on Lightning rails secured the bitcoin network,” said Saylor. “That’s when people will wake up and realize, holy crap, this really is going to change the world.”