Japanese investment and consulting firm, Metaplanet, continues to increase its bitcoin holdings, despite a decline in prices.
The publicly-listed firm injected additional capital to scoop up more Bitcoin amidst a fall in the price of the leading cryptocurrency.
The purchase
On July 7th, Metaplanet officially announced on X that it had paid 400 million Japanese yen, which is equal to $2.5 million, to acquire a total of 42,466 BTC tokens.
After the latest purchase, the total number of BTC tokens held by the company has reached 203,734. The average price that Metaplanet has paid for these tokens is 10 million yen, which is $62,000.
This means that the average purchase price that the firm has paid is higher than the price of BTC at publishing time. It is actually about 7% higher.
The company had made its entry in the Bitcoin market in April of this year. It had decided to adopt the cryptocurrency as a treasury asset.
Its first purchase of Bitcoin was valued at $6.5 million. Metaplanet had announced the news on April 8th. It said that prominent members of the industry had backed its decision to acquire Bitcoin.
These include founding members of Ordiswap and founder of Morgan Creek Capital, Jack Liu and Mark Yusko, respectively. Likewise, UTXO Management and Sola Ventures had also supported the move.
The buying spree
The aggressive buying spree of the company resembles that of MicroStrategy when it had made its entry in the Bitcoin market in 2020.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Metaplanet is now being referred to as ‘Asia’s MicroStrategy’. Microstrategy had begun to purchase BTC in 2020 as a hedge against inflation and to avoid holding cash.
As of June 2024, the total Bitcoin holdings of Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy have increased to 226,331 tokens.
It has paid a total of $7.538 billion for these tokens, which makes it an average price of $35,158 per coin.
Stock Impact
The market momentum of the Japanese company saw a huge impact from its move into the Bitcoin market.
A day after it announced its first purchase of Bitcoin, Metaplanet saw its stock price rise by a whopping 90%.
However, a decline in the price of Bitcoin saw the company’s share price take a hit. On June 11th, the stock price had peaked at 107 yen, or $0.66.
But, Bitcoin saw its price plunge from $70,000 to below the $60,000 mark. This prompted a 25% decline in the stock price of Metaplanet.
Data from TradingView showed that the stock price of the company has now come down to 80 yen, or $0.5. However, it is still about 344% higher than what it had been at the beginning of this year.
Metaplanet announced in late June that it was planning to issue bonds worth 1 billion yen, or $6.26 million, to raise money to purchase more Bitcoin.
MicroStraegy had also made a similar announcement this year for raising funds to purchase more BTC tokens.