On Wednesday, the biggest corporate holder of Bitcoins, MicroStrategy disclosed that it had actually sold off some of its Bitcoin reserves on December 22nd.
However, this does not mean that the American software firm has retreated from Bitcoin, as it has bought more Bitcoin since then.
The company still remains pro-bitcoin, as does Michael Saylor, its co-founder who is known to be bullish.
The sale
The company disclosed the sale of bitcoins on December 22nd in a filing it made with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
According to the company, it sold a total of 704 bitcoins for a value of $11.8 million. This move could bring some tax benefits for MicroStrategy.
This is due to the fact that Bitcoin has lost a great deal of its value since the company first began acquiring it in 2020.
The company elaborated that it was planning on carrying back the capital losses that it had generated through this transaction against the capital gains made previously.
It said that it would carry them back to the extent it is permitted under the applicable federal income tax laws, which would help reduce the company’s tax liabilities.
The purchase
However, on December 24th, the company once more purchased Bitcoin tokens. It bought about 810 coins for a value of $13.6 million.
Between November 1st and December 21st, MicroStrategy also purchased an additional 2,395 BTC tokens for a cost of $42.8 million.
This means that since the beginning of the month, the company has added a total of 2,500 bitcoins to its total reserves.
This means that the total bitcoin holdings of MicroStrategy now stand at 132,500 tokens, which currently have a value of $2.2 billion at the time of writing, as CoinGecko reports the price of 1 BTC to be $16,735.
The issues
While MicroStrategy has continued to buy more bitcoin, it should be noted that its total reserves are now underwater.
The total amount that the company has currently spent on acquiring bitcoins is about $4.03 billion, which means that it has paid a price of $30,397 per BTC.
MicroStrategy was established back in 1989 and one of its co-founders is bitcoin maximalist Michael Saylor, who was also the CEO of the company until August this year.
However, he stepped down from his position and took up the role of executive chairman, as he said that this would help him focus more on the bitcoin acquisition strategy of the firm.
The role of CEO was given to Phong Le, who is also the President of MicroStrategy. After Saylor had stepped down from his position as CEO, civil charges were filed against him and MicroStrategy.
In late August, Karl Racine, the Washington D.C. Attorney General filed the charges due to alleged tax fraud.
According to Racine, the company had helped Saylor in evading taxes when he had lived in DC, but the charges were disputed by Saylor and the company itself.
They said that they would aggressively defend the charges because they were false.