Bankless
"Fix the Money, Fix the World" — Michael Saylor's Master Plan (plus questions on Quantum and Ethereum)
13 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
the light at the end of the tunnel is becoming clearer and it's actually getting very simpler.
Chapter 2: What is Michael Saylor's $21 million Bitcoin thesis?
And so here's the very simple idea, right? How do you make the world a better place? You provide a utilitarian value, something valuable to a billion people that everybody just agrees on.
Chapter 3: What needs to happen for Bitcoin to reach $21 million?
With Rockefeller, it's like kerosene gasoline and everybody just lives a better life. And then with Ford, it was an automobile. And who doesn't want an automobile? And then Jobs gave a billion people an iPhone. So what is the equivalent in the digital asset space? And the answer is everybody would just like a bank account that pays them more than the inflation rate.
Like, how about give me a bank account that pays me 8%. Right now, your bank pays you zero. You know, what we say tongue-in-cheek is fix the money.
Chapter 4: Why did STRC become Strategy’s breakout product?
We have a chance, in my opinion, to fix the money for a billion people. not complicated, just requires that one not get distracted.
Michael Saylor, welcome to Bankless for the first time. Hey, happy to be here. All right, I'm going to start with the big question that everyone's wondering is, where do you believe the price of Bitcoin will go?
Chapter 5: How is a Bitcoin-backed money market structured?
Well, you know, I think it's going up. Like I've said, I've got a 21-year view. And my 21-year view is that over the course of 21 years, it's going to average about 29% ARR. It's going to decelerate. It's been growing a bit faster and it will decelerate to grow a bit slower. I think the past five years, it's like a 37% annualized growth rate.
So if it moves from 37% down to 20%, you'll get some blended rate, you'll get a blended volatility. And I think, where are we right now? I think it's oversold. So I would expect that Bitcoin will be much higher by the end of the year. than it is right now. But you know, Bitcoin has a way of making fools of all of us when we try to forecast its 12 week move or 24 or two week move.
It's a bit above my pay grade. So long term, I am bullish. Near term, I'm also bullish. And in the intermediate frame, I'm sure there'll be a lot of unexpected surprises due to unexpected developments that none of us can anticipate.
Okay, so at that level of growth, like the 20-year time horizon, what price does that get us to for Bitcoin?
Oh, I think eventually it's going to $20 million, $21 million a coin.
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Chapter 6: What risks does Strategy face in its Bitcoin strategy?
$21 million a coin. Okay, so what's that, like a market cap of like $400 trillion, something like this? $400 trillion.
I think it's going to emerge as the dominant digital capital of the world. What would shake your confidence in that? I haven't seen anything to shake my confidence yet. By definition, Black Swan, something unexpected, unanticipated.
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Chapter 7: How does quantum computing pose a risk to Bitcoin?
It's a genuine belief that you shouldn't need permission from an institution to use your money. MetaMask has been around since the beginning of Ethereum, and they carry the same DNA we do. MetaMask was my first wallet. And well, if you haven't opened up the app recently, let me tell you, they've been shipping, creating the one app to finally replace your bank and exchange.
You can trade just about everything right from within MetaMask. Leverage purpose via hyperliquid, prediction markets through polymarket, tokenized stocks like NVIDIA, and you can swap tokens gaslessly and across networks and even spend your crypto with your MetaMask card at real merchants all around the world. It's better than institution services, but from a self-custodial wallet.
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I guess the inverse of that question is what has to go right for that to be the case, $20 million Bitcoin?
That's a little bit easier answer. The global embrace of it is a legitimate asset. So as the Americans, the Chinese, the Europeans, the Japanese recognize it as a capital asset that you can hold for long-term investment or long-term store value, that's a big That's a big step. The second step is adoption by the banking system.
Right now, the Basel rules heavily penalize a bank from holding Bitcoin. I think if they normalize that so that banks aren't penalized for holding Bitcoin as collateral, I think that would be a big step forward.
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Chapter 8: What is Michael Saylor's current perspective on Ethereum?
I think the securitization of the asset, the formation of all these ETFs and the amount of capital flows into it is a third step. I think the formation of bank credit networks, like, you know, there's about, call 450 Bitcoin a day at 70,000 a coin, 30 million a day, about $10 billion a year in organic supply available for sale from the miners. So call that 10 billion a year is one year supply.
That's going to get cut in half in two years. Every time someone creates $10 billion of credit, they buy the entire year supply. So for example, my company sold about $10 billion worth of digital credit. We bought an entire year supply on that digital credit. And that's something we created in the past 12 months. But if a bank like JP Morgan starts to extend credit on Bitcoin as collateral,
Someone posts $100 billion or $50 billion of Bitcoin. JP Morgan offers $10 billion of credit. That $10 billion of credit is one year's supply of Bitcoin. So every $10 billion of credit that's created is one turn on the network.
So I would be looking at the formation of bank credit networks and how big they get, like how much credit will Schwab or Citi or Morgan Stanley or JP Morgan extend on the underlying capital asset? Because the thing that holds the price back is the need to rehypothecate the Bitcoin in order to generate a loan or get yield.
So a lot of people, you know, you've got more than a trillion dollars worth of Bitcoin out there that's unbanked in the shadow banking system. So when I need yield, I'm rehypothecating it and someone short selling it. And when I need a loan, if you want a conventional loan against Bitcoin, you're paying 11%, 12% sometimes.
But if you went to a crypto exchange, they might give you the same loan for 2%, 3%. But the catch is the cheap money requires that you transfer the Bitcoin and they rehypothecate it. So... So if someone's pledging $100 billion of Bitcoin as collateral on the crypto economy in order to borrow $10 or $20 billion of cash to spend, then you're short selling $100 billion of Bitcoin.
So you're short selling 10-year supply of Bitcoin. So I would say probably the thing that's holding the price back is rehypothecation of the underlying crypto asset in the crypto economy. And the thing that will drive the price to the moon is people stop rehypothecating.
And we call that asset back, we put it in cold storage, and then whoever sold it short has to buy it back and the price moves north. But of course, the reason that people don't do that is because up until now, even today, it's very difficult to get a conforming loan or a conventional loan against Bitcoin. So people are forced into the crypto economy and this dynamic of re-hypothecation.
So bank credit networks will be very big. I mean, $100 billion or more bank credit could form. And not only will you have less demand to sell $100 billion of Bitcoin, but you will also have people migrating from rehypothecation and non-rehypothecation, and that'll create a short squeeze on the other side. The other dynamic is digital credit.
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