Encrypt "big player" MicroStrategy's largest move in three years: Spending a staggering $1.1 billion to acquire nearly 20,000 bitcoins.

MicroStrategy (MSTR.US) recently purchased approximately 18,300 bitcoins at a price of around $1.1 billion, marking the company's largest single investment in digital assets in over three years. According to a filing submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last Friday, the enterprise software manufacturer completed this purchase between August 6 and September 12. It is worth noting that this is the largest bitcoin purchase made by MicroStrategy since the company announced the purchase of 19,452 bitcoins in February 2021. As of now, MicroStrategy's bitcoin holdings have reached approximately 244,800 bitcoins, with a total value of around $14 billion, accounting for nearly 1% of the total historical bitcoin issuance. In comparison, BlackRock, Inc.'s iShares Bitcoin Trust, the world's largest bitcoin fund, has assets totaling around $20 billion. With an $1.1 billion investment, bitcoin "whale" MicroStrategy has made its largest bitcoin acquisition in three years. The filing shows that the average purchase cost of MicroStrategy's bitcoins is around $38,585, with a total investment of approximately $9.45 billion. On Friday, the price of bitcoin remained relatively stable at around $57,880, and rose further after the U.S. stock market closed, breaking the $60,000 mark for the first time since the end of August, with gains of over 10% in the past 24 hours. At the time of writing, bitcoin is up 3.86% last week, trading at $60,079. Since 2020, MicroStrategy has been purchasing bitcoin as part of its capital allocation strategy, with the company's co-founder and chairman Michael Saylor stating that this move is to hedge against inflation risks. While Saylor has garnered support within the bitcoin community, few U.S. publicly traded companies, apart from a few such as Tesla, Inc., choose to hold such volatile cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets. To fund its recent bitcoin purchases, MicroStrategy raised funds through issuing and selling common stock. In August of this year, the company implemented a 1:10 stock split to make its stock more accessible to investors and employees. This year, MicroStrategy's stock price has more than doubled, outperforming the approximately 40% increase in bitcoin prices during the same period.