Starskov retweeted
Today was the most difficult day in the history of Digital Credit.
$STRC traded as low as $82.50 before recovering sharply. $SATA traded from par down to the low 90s before also rebounding. It was a difficult day for many investors.
What happened today was a leverage liquidation event, not a deterioration in underlying credit quality.
There is an old saying in income markets that the road to hell is paved with carry.
When investors discover an asset that offers attractive yields, relatively low volatility, and strong underlying credit characteristics, many eventually decide that owning it is not enough. They borrow against it. They lever it. They attempt to enhance the carry.
That works until it doesn't.
When markets move against leveraged holders, forced selling can create a cascade. Prices fall, margin calls increase, more selling occurs, and the cycle feeds on itself. The selling becomes disconnected from fundamentals and becomes driven by balance sheet constraints.
We have seen this many times before in traditional finance. Some of the largest hedge fund failures in history involved highly leveraged positions in U.S. Treasuries. Not because Treasuries suddenly became poor credits, but because investors became overextended while trying to earn additional yield on assets that appeared safe and stable.
That is the dynamic that played out today in Digital Credit.
Importantly, the creditworthiness of the issuers remains strong.
At @Strive, our dividend reserves remain intact. Our company is not under stress. We remain well positioned to meet our obligations and continue executing our strategy. The underlying credit profile remains substantially unchanged from where it was before today's volatility.
One of the lessons markets teach repeatedly is that leverage flushes are not necessarily evidence of weak collateral. In many cases, they occur precisely because the underlying collateral is viewed as stable enough to encourage excessive leverage in the first place.
In that sense, today's events were difficult for some investors, but they were also instructive.
Digital Credit is still in its infancy. It is better for the market to experience and learn from these dynamics now, while the market remains relatively small, than years from now when the market is many times larger. Investors, issuers, and market participants all benefit from understanding the risks associated with leverage and liquidity before the asset class reaches full scale.
No one knows with certainty whether today's lows will ultimately prove to be the bottom.
What is clear is that there was substantial demand at those prices. Both $STRC and $SATA experienced significant buying interest off their intraday lows, resulting in sharp recoveries. That price action reflects meaningful demand entering the market at lower levels and is an encouraging sign for the health of the asset class.
A liquidation event and a credit event are not the same thing.
The price action today did not change my conviction in the long-term opportunity for Digital Credit. If anything, it reinforced my belief that we are building an entirely new category of financial instrument that will experience many of the same growing pains that other large fixed income markets experienced before reaching maturity.
The volatility was uncomfortable for many participants.
The lesson will prove valuable.
Stay calm. Focus on fundamentals. Markets have a way of working through excesses, and when they do, stronger foundations are often left behind.
Starskov retweeted
Air passengers are bracing for travel disruptions to worsen in the coming days, as thousands of flights were delayed and canceled over the weekend and the longest government shutdown in U.S. history reached its 41st day. wapo.st/3Xr4VNr
Starskov retweeted
Just listened virtually to Saylor's closing remarks with the indomitable @tnorth team, and there was a section that really spoke to meā
He mentioned how there are plenty of people who are angry at Bitcoin and want to short it, and that he would rather it be his stock that they short, not someone else's or Bitcoin itself. His reasoning? He never wants them to lose faith in the fact that he is doubly long.
What. A. Hero.
It reminded me of the third bullet point in my original MSTR one-pager, where I described MSTR as a great trade because it "benefits from the 'possibility' that Bitcoin can go to zero (long epistemic incongruence)." You need that counter-energy, those skeptics and short-sellers, to ultimately create leptokurtic curves, i.e., fat-tailed long-vol events.
But what moved me even more was when he said that the people who truly understand MSTR are the ones who understand that they, in fact, donāt fully understand. And that requires a level of humility because, as he put it, "the market is much bigger than any of us." He spoke to how highly efficient capital markets, filled with expert professionals (myself included, thank you for the shoutout!) are all exerting different forces for different needs, creating a system that is dynamic and far beyond any one centralized point of control.
And so thereās been a lot of discourse around MSTR lately, with many opposing perspectives rooted in different economic, financial, or philosophical beliefsāall of them sound, reasonable, and well-intentioned even if they get heated and personal at times. I do my best to contribute to that conversation in the way I best know how which is really driven by a deep sense of fiduciary duty honed over my entire career as an investment manager. When I critique metrics like BPS or call out the confusion around Bitcoin yield or try to unwrap what ROC can sometimes mask, itās never to undermine the community, but to collectively explore paths that could lead to better outcomes for everyone.
Because the truth is that I of course donāt know what the exact path of the future holds. None of us do. And hearing Saylor express such humility towards the extraordinary privilege of this journey weāre all on together, regardless of what the outcome may be, resonated deeply with me. When he says he believes MSTR can be a great force for humanity: "for you, your family, your company, your community, your institution, your country"āI recognized his sincerity was deeply coming from his heart, and I felt deeply his unwavering courage.
With that, congratulations to the MSTR team for unleashing an electrifying moment in history. The Bitcoin Standard for Corporations is unstoppable. We all represent the ultimate truth that Bitcoin is hope.
Starskov retweeted
Market buyers have pushed the clutch in.
Net sellers while sidelined capital is wading out uncertainty, and digesting where to place their bets for the new regime
Starskov retweeted
21 Rules of āæitcoin
1. Those who understand buy Bitcoin.
2. Those who donāt, criticize Bitcoin.
3. Everyone is against Bitcoin before they are for it.
4. You will never be done learning about Bitcoin.
5. Bitcoin is powered by chaos.
6. Bitcoin is the only game in the casino that we can all win.
7. Bitcoin is the one thing in the universe that you can truly own.
8. Everyone gets Bitcoin at the price they deserve.
9. Only buy Bitcoin with the money you canāt afford to lose.
10. Tickets to escape the matrix are priced in Bitcoin.
11. Bitcoin insight is restricted to those with a need to know.
12. All your models will be destroyed.
13. The cure to economic ill is the orange pill.
14. Be for Bitcoin, not against Fiat.
15. Bitcoin is for everyone.
16. Learn to think in Bitcoin.
17. You donāt change Bitcoin, it changes you.
18. Laser eyes protect you from endless lies.
19. Respect Bitcoin, or it will make a clown out of you.
20. You do not sell your Bitcoin.
21. Spread Bitcoin with love.
Starskov retweeted
Live with Restream, February 05 xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1LyGBWMmMā¦
Starskov retweeted
šØ PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS JUST SIGNED A CRYPTO EXECUTIVE ORDER.
I'VE STUDIED IT.
HERE'S A BREAKDOWN:
Starskov retweeted
JUST IN: Utah State Rep Jordan Teuscher introduces Strategic Bitcoin Reserve legislation šŗšø
Starskov retweeted
Met up with an old friend yesterday. He bought 1 bitcoin in 2017 for ~$4,500 and took my advice to hodl seriously. He has held it in cold storage since and never paid any attention to it or to developments in the bitcoin world. He's now up ~$100,000.
His family owns a hotel, spa, hospital, pharmacy, and a restaurant. He was comparing how much work, capital, government regulation, and stress it takes to squeeze $100,000 out of his businesses compared to bitcoin, which has:
no maintenance cost
no maintenance time
no employee problems
no customer satisfaction problems
no dealing with government
Truly, there is no second best.
Replying to @Cobratate
Bitcoin is a better investment than Swiss hotels or restaurants or car factories because bitcoin is offering a far more valuable product to the world: a replacement for central banks. Since central banks are the absolute worst, most criminal and most destructive thing on earth, there is an enormous market reward for anyone that can put offer people an alternative. When you buy bitcoin, you are growing the bitcoin pool of liquidity and offering people a money better than central bank slavery. You're making bitcoin better and the market rewards you for your investment. The world needs a central bank replacement a lot more than Switzerland needs another hotel.
But this is a transitory phase that cannot last forever. Bitcoin can't keep replacing central banks forever. Eventually it replaces them all and when they and all their shitcoins are dead, bitcoin won't be making enormous returns anymore. It only makes enormous return by eating other crappy moneys , but when all the crappy moneys die, bitcoin only grows in value as the production of other goods increases. It will only appreciate at 1-5% per year in terms of most goods and services. At that point, Swiss hotels become attractive again.
Deflation is NOT a bad thing, and this is the biggest and most criminal psyop ever perpetuated on humanity, because everything evil is downstream from government inflation, and this is the justification for inflation. Deflation is just another word for economic growth. It is completely normal and good that things become cheaper over time. That's why we work. Work produces things and when things become more abundant they become cheaper. The market chooses the money that is the hardest to make precisely because the limit on supply growth makes it depreicate the least. The natural order is that everything gets cheaper. This does NOT mean that nobody would be consuming or investing. People do not consume just because they expect their money to depreciate. They consume to survive and to enjoy life. It doesn't matter how much cheaper you expect food, clothing, phones,or shelter will be next year. You want these things today and will pay for them today to use them today. Everyone knows their laptop and phone will be significantly cheaper next year and yet they all buy it. It's true that appreciating money will make you less likely to spend money on frivolous bullshit you don't need, and that's a good thing. Debt-fueled mass consumption is a moral disaster for humanity and Bitcoin can't kill it soon enough. The world doesn't need you to waste money on stupid bullshit.
And people don't just invest because they expect money to depreciate. They invest because productive activity produces a surplus over holding money. And the key thing to remember is that money would not appreciate if people weren't investing and producing. So it's impossible to imagine a scenario where nobody invests but money appreciates.
In sum, deflation is great, and it is the absolute best thing about bitcoin. Bitcoin being deflationary makes it the best investment opportunity in the world for as long as central banks exist. You are being perfectly rational to not want to invest in things that aren't as productive, morally imperative, and important as ending central banks. There'll be plenty of time and money for Swiss hotels when central banks are dead.
Starskov retweeted
JUST IN: šŗšø Donald Trump's pick for Treasury secretary Scott Bessent says "I see no reason for the U.S. to have a CBDC."
Starskov retweeted
Stocks making the biggest moves premarket: UnitedHealth, Morgan Stanley, Target, Southwest & more cnbc.com/2025/01/16/stocks-mā¦
Starskov retweeted
Steph really hit his "look away" on the biggest shot of the night šÆ
Starskov retweeted
$MSTR True North - Episode 13 (Week of Jan 17 expiration) xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1RDxlylWZā¦
Starskov retweeted
JUST IN: #Bitcoin reclaims $100,000 š„
xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1mnxeApZjā¦






















