On December 23, 2020, the Canadian financial tech firm Mogo announced its plans to invest 1.5% of the company’s reserve assets into bitcoin by the year’s end. Mogo’s president and CFO said the initial corporate investment of up to $1.5 million in bitcoin builds on the company’s product development related investments in bitcoin during the last few years.
Ever since Microstrategy purchased bitcoin to replace a percentage of the firm’s cash reserves, a large swathe of companies followed the bitcoin balance-sheet model. At the time of publication, there are now 28 publicly listed firms, private companies, and ETF-like funds represented on the web portal bitcointreasuries.org. The 28 entities have a whopping 1,150,622 BTC worth over $27 billion using today’s exchange rates or 5.48% of the supply.
On Wednesday, the publicly listed Canadian company Mogo (NASDAQ:MOGO) (TSX:MOGO) announced it will be dedicating 1.5% of the firm’s total assets to bitcoin. The established fintech firm will join the 28 entities that have added bitcoin (BTC) to company portfolios.
“[Mogo] plans to make an initial corporate investment of up to $1.5 million in bitcoin and will consider additional investments in 2021, as it monetizes its $17 million investment portfolio,” the company revealed. “The initial purchase would represent approximately 1.5% of Mogo’s total assets as of the end of the third quarter of 2020.”
Mogo has already been dedicating energy toward the cryptocurrency economy and in 2018 the firm launched the Mogocrypto app. The application allows users from Canada to purchase and sell bitcoin (BTC) by using their smartphones. More recently, Mogo announced the launch of a bitcoin rewards program that rewards users in bitcoin if they interact with Mojo’s products.
“Earlier this month, Mogo reported a 135% month-over-month increase in the dollar value of bitcoin traded on the Mogo platform from October 2020 to November 2020,” the company added.
“We are strong believers in bitcoin as an asset class and believe this investment is consistent with our goal to make bitcoin investing available to all Canadians,” the company president and CFO Greg Feller said during Wednesday’s announcement. “In addition, we believe bitcoin represents an attractive investment for our shareholders with significant long-term potential as its adoption continues to grow globally,” he added.
Feller continued by stating:
We plan to initially allocate a modest portion of our capital toward bitcoin investments and will consider additional investments in bitcoin as we monetize some of our existing $17 million portfolio, which we expect to begin doing in 2021.
The recent news from Mogo follows Elon Musk discussing putting Tesla’s billions into bitcoin with Microstrategy’s CEO Michael Saylor. It also follows the $745 million purchase Ruffer Investment made with help from the San Francisco-based crypto exchange Coinbase and One River Digital. Coinbase has been helping a lot of firms with big transactions as the firm also brokered Microstrategy’s influential $425 million bitcoin purchase.
Mojo likely has its own method of purchasing large sums of bitcoin (BTC) by commanding its own trading platform. “As the only well-established Canadian company publicly traded on the TSX and NASDAQ, offering a simple and low-cost way to buy and sell bitcoin through our award-winning app, we are well-positioned to capitalize on the fast-growing demand for bitcoin,” Mojo’s president concluded.
What do you think about all the companies starting to hold bitcoin on their balance sheets? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.
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