Strategy (MSTR) Executive Chairman Michael Saylor said the Middle East has the opportunity to become the “Switzerland of the 21st century” by adopting Bitcoin-backed banking, credit and digital money.
In a detailed presentation at Bitcoin MENA, Saylor urged the region to take advantage of the $200 trillion opportunity by enabling banks to custody Bitcoin, offer BTC-backed credit, and ultimately launch yield-generating digital money products.
“If you’re interested in making your country the digital banking capital of the world… if you want to be the Switzerland of the 21st century, these are three ideas: bigger, bigger and biggest,” Saylor told the audience.
A big idea “was for sovereign wealth funds to invest in Bitcoin,” Saylor said. One “big idea” was to create banks that store Bitcoin and provide loans against it. The “biggest” idea was to create digital money accounts backed by BTC credit instruments, offering yields of up to 8% with no volatility.
“You will not extract even a little bit of Bitcoin,” Saylor said. “You will literally pull billions and tens of billions and hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars of capital away from people who don’t understand Bitcoin.”
Saylor claimed that the US is now leading the global regulatory shift towards Bitcoin, which he described as having almost unanimous support from government officials. “There is a deep consensus among all the people who run the United States,” he said. “Donald J. Trump says he intends to make America a bitcoin superpower, the crypto capital of the world, a leader in the digital asset.”
He said he had personally spoken with the Vice President, the Secretary of the Treasury, the head of the SEC, the Commerce Secretary and other top officials, all of whom, Saylor claimed, view Bitcoin as a strategic asset.
Saylor also said that US banks that once refused to touch Bitcoin are now moving to actively support it.
“Not all the big banks in the United States are doing Bitcoin banking 12 months ago, in the last six months, BNY Mellon, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Charles Schwab, JP Morgan, Citi have contacted me,” he said. “They are all starting to issue credits against Bitcoin or Bitcoin derivatives like IBIT.”
The strategy holds over 660,000 BTC and is now issuing a range of BTC-backed credit instruments, including perpetual preferred stocks and short-term notes paying monthly dividends.
“We are converting a period of 120 months or 240 months into one month,” he said. “Pay me now.”
Saylor framed these innovations as the foundation of a new type of financial system. “Digital capital creates digital credit, and digital credit creates digital money,” he said. “That’s the killer app.”