Breaking: Arkham Reveals Strategy’s Actual Total Bitcoin Holdings

Amid the proof-of-reserve debate, which began with Michael Saylor’s recent comments, Arkham Intelligence has traced wallets holding Strategy Bitcoin holdings. The on-chain analytics platform revealed that it has identified 97% of the company’s 580,250 BTC stash.

Arkham Identifies Strategy’s Bitcoin Holdings

In an X post, Arkham Intelligence announced that they have identified an additional 53,833 BTC ($5.75 billion), bringing the platform’s coverage of Strategy and Saylor’s holdings to $59.92 billion, which accounts for 97% of the company’s total holdings. The platform noted that it has become the first to publicly identify these BTC holdings.

This comes after CoinGape reported yesterday that Arkham had identified an additional 70,816 BTC belonging to Saylor’s company, which brought the total identified holdings to $54.5 billion.

The platform stated that the latest development brings them one step closer to a free and public proof of reserves for all of Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings. Arkham’s explorer shows that the company holds over 454,000 BTC in segregated custody. Meanwhile, around 107,000 BTC is in Fidelity’s omnibus custody and therefore doesn’t appear on the explorer.

This discovery comes just days after Michael Saylor stated that proof-of-reserve is a bad idea. He further cited security concerns, noting that doxxing these wallets could lead to vulnerabilities and a potential cyberattack.

Commenting on this take from Saylor, Nate Geraci, the president of the ETF Store, stated in an X post that Strategy should be comfortable with publishing its wallet addresses if asset manager Bitwise is comfortable with doing so. He added that one of the points of Bitcoin and crypto in general is transparency, not “obfuscation.”

Bitwise Exec Weighs In On Proof-Reserve-Debate

In an X post, Hong Kim, Bitwise’s co-founder, commented on Saylor’s statement about a proof-of-reserve for Strategy’s holdings, stating that public auditability and private ownership can safely coexist with Bitcoin. Kim remarked that his firm will continue to champion this unique property of Bitcoin.

The Bitwise co-founder clarified that publishing addresses isn’t a “panacea.” However, he remarked that companies need auditors for attestation on the liability side. Kim added that they have to be mindful of operational business privacy concerns.

On the other hand, he believes that the bias for Bitcoin ETFs should be towards them publishing their addresses. Kim explained that this is because these public investment vehicles already have their information, like custodian, daily inflows, and outflows, publicly available. The co-founder noted that this increases public confidence in these products and in the network as a whole.