Strategy CEO Phong Le and Blockstream CEO Adam Back appeared Wednesday on a panel moderated by Natalie Brunell, covering Bitcoin treasury strategy, tokenization, digital credit, and the enduring mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto.
The conversation drew a picture of a financial system in transition, with Bitcoin at its center.
Le opened with a striking observation about Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings. The company now holds 818,334, putting it second behind only one entity.
“There is only one individual entity with more Bitcoin than Strategy,” Le said. “That’s Satoshi.”
The firm is on pace to reach 1 million BTC in the next couple of months, a milestone that would cement its place in financial history.
Digital credit in the bitcoin space
Much of the discussion centered on Stretch, or STRC, Strategy’s perpetual preferred stock that pays an 11.5% annual dividend with proceeds used to purchase Bitcoin.
Le was direct about why the product matters. “This product does good,” he said, contrasting it with industries like tobacco and processed food.
Investors use STRC as a place to park short-term money, and it has served as a lower barrier for people seeking BTC exposure. Layer 2 products and DeFi protocols are now being built on top of it, Le said, describing STRC as “the most important credit product of all time” and a cornerstone for bringing BTC and DeFi together.
Back addressed the intersection of cypherpunk ideology and institutional finance, a tension the Bitcoin community has long wrestled with.
He said BTC’s acceptance by sovereign wealth funds and private funds is “a sign of success,” not a compromise. Cypherpunks, he explained, believed in capital formation and free markets, not just cryptographic privacy.
Back said treasury companies exist to grow Bitcoin per share, and when they do, individual holders benefit too.
Le reinforced the point, saying he learned much from Back when they first met. “Cypherpunks are gifted minds who understand the markets very well,” Le said, framing the movement as one that has always operated at the intersection of technology and capital.
On tokenization, both men saw it as the next structural shift. Le described it as “the digitalization of markets,” with blockchain providing the transparency layer.
He pointed to tap-to-pay as an analogy. “Why can’t you do that to a stock, peer to peer?” he asked. Back added that tokenization enables 24/7 trading, use of assets as collateral, and unlocks value in assets that are hard to discover or trade, like private notes and contracts.
When asked if major banks would compete in bitcoin digital credit, Le said he expected them to. He compared it to Amazon reshaping retail and forcing Walmart to respond.
Then he added: “I’d love to see Morgan Stanley on that list” regarding massive bitcoin companies.
The panel closed on a lighter note. Brunell asked Back about a New York Times investigation published earlier this month that named him as Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
Back, who denied the claim when the story broke, did not address it directly. “We are in a very good place regarding people adopting the technology,” he said.