Spotlight:BTC
M. Marin: In terms of buying Bitcoin and possibly participating via your company, can you give us a little bit more color on the private placement?
Christoffer De Geer: Sure, so we did, as an example, the exact numbers are, we aim to raise about 10 to 20% of our stock in a preferred share. And, generally, preferred shares have been very easy to sell because, at least in the Swedish market, preferred shares are quite common. And we offer a very high dividend, like 10% per year. It's very high for an investor who can see that we have a huge stack of Bitcoin that's protecting them from problems. So it's been very easy to convince traditional financial investors to buy the preferred share, because some are still hesitant. For example, they don't like the volatility in Bitcoin. Then, what we can do is we can package that volatility in a preferred share and give them 10% of Bitcoin's revenue or increase in value, where we take the rest.
We take the risk of the ups and downs, but they get the packaged volatility, but they only get a part of it. And that seems to be, there still seems to be a high investor base that are afraid of Bitcoin's volatility. And they are the ones that are interested in this monthly dividend. There's also an interesting concept of, if you get monthly dividends, it seems to be almost a psychological benefit because a lot of people say like, "Oh, I'm gonna buy it and then that's my salary," kind of, which is interesting. It shouldn't really matter, but it seems to matter. So it's been good to collect interest for the round that's been quite positive, I would say.
M. Marin: Could you give us an idea, unless you already said it during the presentation, what the timeline is, and when you expect this?
Christoffer De Geer: Sure, we have the meeting, I think 21st of October, the general meeting to approve the preferred share, and after that, as quickly as possible, preferably, we would finalize the round.
M. Marin: And am I correct in thinking that at this point it's primarily or exclusively Swedish investors that can participate?
Christoffer De Geer: I think everyone can participate. Before we actually approve the share, no one can participate. But as soon as that's done, I think most people can participate. And then we will likely try to do a private placement and then a public to give access to our current shareholders as well. I think US investors can invest if we target a high-net-worth individual, for example. But at the same time, the round will be, maybe the first round is about $3 million. Sweden is sufficient, I think, to fill that without a
M. Marin: Can you give us a little bit of color on A, the regulatory background, and B, the competitive lens?
Christoffer De Geer: Yeah, sure. So, I mean, we didn't invent this idea. This is a strategy, and Michael Saylor invented this idea in the US. The US is very saturated in that sense. We can't compete. In Sweden, we have other competitors. We even have other competitors here. And it's, I think, an unsaturated market at the moment, at least from what I've seen from how easy it was to find interest for the preferred share. It seems to be a very, it's a good market to operate in, at the moment, in Scandinavia. The regulatory landscape is super simple in our case. We're not affected by MiCA, which is the market in crypto assets regulation that we have in Europe. We're just an investment company, so it's been very simple. It's almost, it's always been confusingly simple to list the company to just list here without the C market, everything has been, it's a very simple process which has been pleasant.
The question is about Bitcoin's volatility. How can we use that compared to a private investor, for example, and one thing you can always do is trade, in theory. We don't, I don't want to trade. It's a dangerous thing when Bitcoin is so volatile. So what you do instead is that you, as I think is a better approach, and that companies can do that private people can't, is that you package that volatility and say, we know or we believe Bitcoin will increase a lot, but in a volatile fashion, therefore we package this volatility to you as a preferred share that gives dividend flat.
And therefore, we took that volatility away, and the spread between that is what we benefit from. And you can't do that as a private investor. You can't have a share price that's different from your net asset value or issue a private, somehow, preferred share. So that's how I would say you utilize the volatility in our case. But we don't dare to trade. I don't want to time the market, nothing like that. Bitcoin is way too volatile. And no one is smart enough to do that, I think.
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