2024 was a big year for Bitcoin. It was the year of the spot Bitcoin ETF approvals, the beginnings of corporate adoption of Bitcoin, and the first crossing of the hundred-thousand-dollar milestone. Of these, the ETF did the most to bring mass adoption to Bitcoin. Now, any retirement account can have Bitcoin exposure at the click of a button. Though it does not provide true bitcoin ownership in the form of self-custody of private keys, it does act as a gateway drug to get normies interested in Bitcoin.

Perhaps the most important person of the year for Bitcoin was Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock. Fink has a low-profile presence in the financial press, but enough clout that his endorsement was enough to give comfort to vast pools of capital to invest in Bitcoin. BlackRock’s stamp of approval was a big win for Bitcoin, and the ETF inflows are likely what led to crossing the $100k threshold.

Speaking of which, my favorite Bitcoin video of the year was God Save The Coin by Michael Goldstein of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute. It runs through all the different criticisms Bitcoin faced since its inception. At the end of the day, Bitcoin doesn’t care and marches on. The narratives and criticism around Bitcoin will constantly shift and evolve, yet there is nothing like the market test to prove its value.

Looking ahead, 2025 will be the year of corporate adoption of Bitcoin. This is already happening, with MicroStrategy leading the pack and open-sourcing its playbook for companies to convert their cash holdings into bitcoin. Not only have most of the bitcoin miners decided to HODL bitcoin, but so too have over a dozen other assorted companies. I expect a Fortune 500 company to buy bitcoin on its balance sheet this year in 2025, and Michael Saylor to be the most famous/infamous figure for Bitcoin in 2025.

I’ll write separately about MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin treasury operations and assess its leverage/risk, but its most fascinating impact is on the corporate bond market, which can now have Bitcoin exposure through convertible debt. And it’s not just MicroStrategy, as all the other miners are following suit, with Marathon and Riot leading the pack. The bond markets are larger than the equity markets, and providing this channel for the bond market to have Bitcoin exposure is probably the most unanticipated outcome in Bitcoin thus far, and may have the most significant consequences that no one expected.

Finally, I’m optimistic that the new Trump Administration will adopt favorable regulation towards crypto in general, though I do not expect the US government to buy bitcoin the way it holds gold. The new chair of the Council of Economic Advisers is favorable to the idea of the US holding Bitcoin. But he has remarked that the US already holds so much bitcoin because of prior seizures (like the Silk Road). I expect the new administration to simply re-label those holdings as a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, without making any new purchases this year.

As for corporate adoption, I expect small companies to continue to convert some of their cash to bitcoin. For the big companies, my Hail Mary bet is that the first major purchase will come from Tesla, Meta, or Dell. Tesla already has some bitcoin on its balance sheet from its purchase a few years ago, and Elon Musk is slowly learning about the problems of inflation while advising President Trump, evidenced by his posting of Milton Friedman videos on X. Mark Zuckerberg is pushing forward open-source AI; the next logical step is open-source money.

So I’m optimistic about 2025 for Bitcoin, even though 2024 will be hard to beat!