Metaplanet's Bitcoin Strategy Propels Stock to Unprecedented Heights

Investment company Metaplanet has seen its shares rise as much as 158% over the past week to become the top performer among all shares in Japan.

This company has a stock price of 93 Japanese Yen, which advanced a 127% in just a two-day trading period.

Such growth has been so strong that during last week it set off the trading halt, due to the circuit breaker mechanism being activated for the first time in a while at the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

With nearly a 1 billion market cap, at $14.8 billion Japanese yen, Metaplanet shows a strong financial market presence.

Metaplanet Follows MicroStrategy's Footprints

This was given as the reason the company had adopted a strategy almost identical to that of MicroStrategy, the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin.

Metaplanet had declared a strategy for Bitcoin investment on 8 April, when it had stocked 117.7 Bitcoin, now pricing at $7.2 million, resulting in a 389% rise in its stock.

Commenting about the capital markets in a released statement done on the 13th of May, Metaplanet mentioned that it plans to leverage several capital market tools, which will help the company to boost its Bitcoin reserves in a fashion that resembles what MicroStrategy did.

The company said it had to hedge against the growing debt by Japan and the rapidly tumbling yen of Japan.

As another website put it, Japan has the dubious distinction of possessing the developed world's worst debt-to-GDP ratio, standing presently at 261%.

On top of this, the Japanese yen has weakened above 34% since the beginning of 2021 versus the United States dollar.

Metaplanet views its Bitcoin-investing strategy as a direct response to that sort of economic pressure.

It is worth noting that currently, Metaplanet stock is listed only on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and is, therefore, unavailable to U.S. investors. The company announced its plans to tokenize its shares using Bitcoin's layer-2 network, Liquid.

Arnab Rakshit, another co-founder of the STOKR security token platform, said: "I'll be tokenizing Metaplanet shares following the same playbook how MicroStrategy stock was tokenized."

A month ago, Metaplanet disclosed that it decided to add Bitcoin to reserves as a treasury, and here are some of the reasons.

First, it focuses on reducing the risk exposure to the Japanese yen, which has been under heavy pressure due to the low rate conditions in Japan.

In a shareholder update, Metaplanet discussed the vulnerability of the yen and the potential for Bitcoin to serve as an inflation hedge, a tool for greater macroeconomic resilience, and a source of long-term capital appreciation.

Corporate Bitcoin Holders Start to Cash in

For example, Microstrategy, the largest corporate investor in Bitcoin, has already doubled in profits.

With the market price floating around $65,000, the position of MicroStrategy at the moment is north of $12.57 billion in total valuation.

This means that the company, as of today, is sitting on unrealized profits of nearly $6.5 billion, on paper, reflecting a gain of almost 104% in yield to date from an investment allocation started back in 2020 under Saylor.

At report time, Bitcoin was trading at around $69,000, losing over 3% in the past 24 hours. The leading cryptocurrency was 5% below its all-time high of $73,750 on March 14.