Altvest changes its name to Africa Bitcoin Corp and plans to raise R3.68bn ($210m) to invest in bitcoin. The two men behind the project, Altvest CEO Warren Wheatley and tech entrepreneur Stafford Masie, explain this radical new approach to building what they see as bulletproof balance sheets. From Moneyweb.
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Altvest Capital, the first JSE-listed company to acquire bitcoin on its balance sheet, is changing its name to Africa Bitcoin Corp and plans to raise $210 million to establish a strategic bitcoin reserve. This is along the lines of what Michael Saylor has done at Strategy, formerly called MicroStrategy, which now owns more than 630 000 bitcoin (BTC) worth about $70 billion.
Read: Altvest to raise R3.68bn to buy bitcoin
Africa Bitcoin Corporation has big plans. It will ultimately list in London, the US, Namibia, Botswana, Kenya and probably a few other places. Its initial fundraise is for R11 million through the issue of one million shares in Altvest at R11 each. This is certainly a radical move for a JSE-listed company.
The two key drivers behind this are tech entrepreneur Stafford Masie and Warren Wheatley, CEO of Altvest.
Masie explained that this is a first on the African continent, the intention being to steadily accumulate BTC as a more reliable store of value than ZAR (rands) or USD (US dollars).
“So, we’ll accretively dilute our shareholders and essentially increment our BTC yield as we buy more bitcoin,” he said.
“There’s a lot of bitcoin folks out there [asking] why is this happening? Why would I buy your share versus buying bitcoin? I don’t think it’s an either-or. I think it depends on who you are as an individual. If you want to take some risk, you buy an equity like this. And the promise around this equity is, yes, it does come with more risk. So you are depending on Warren and myself and the company to creatively build up your BTC yield.
“It is different from owning the hard asset where you own bitcoin. And we want to say to everyone out there, if you want to own bitcoin, go get bitcoin, take it off the exchange, hold it in cold storage. I’m a bitcoin maxi. We want you to keep doing that.
But if you want to take a little bit of risk, go with us. What we’re going to try and do is work really hard as a business on creatively incrementing your BTC per share.”
Listen/read: Masie’s message to Discovery and Naspers: Get with the bitcoin programme
Who is the bitcoin reserve strategy pitched at?
“Warren and myself have grown up in coloured townships in South Africa. We fundamentally believe in the value proposition of bitcoin. When people say, your groceries are not getting more expensive, your money is getting weaker, we fundamentally believe and understand that.
“The social qualms and challenges that he and I grew up in – me in Eldorado Park and Warren in another coloured township. We’ve seen what broken money does in society.
This is our step forward to lean in, to keep Africa ahead, and to give us the opportunity to break the mould. And we fundamentally believe that bitcoin was made for us.”
Wheatley, who only became “orange-pilled” (a BTC advocate) in 2023, says the core purpose of the new strategy is to build a balance sheet galvanised by bitcoin.
“That’s going to allow us to grow our core business, which is to create wealth for individuals. And that purpose is whether it’s through funding your business or making alternative investment opportunities available to you.
“In the same way a bank or an insurance company props up their balance sheet with government bonds and gold and oil reserves, we want to do the same thing – but with the hardest asset known to man and that will ever exist.
“That’s going to allow us to access pools of capital to pursue those initiatives that we want to do. And those primarily stay the same. That’s creating wealth for the under-resourced through our instruments.
“And people are still going to be able to access alternative investment opportunities, including bitcoin. But most importantly, they’re going to still be able to access capital markets through us.”
Wheatley adds that, ultimately, the plan is to follow Michael Saylor’s example at Strategy and use innovative debt instruments to further accumulate BTC, and so build a balance sheet underpinned by hard assets rather than fiat currency.
Strategy embarked on its bitcoin strategy in 2020 when the share price was $14. Today, it is at $335, with the company owning more than 630 000 bitcoin, valued at about $70 billion. This has prompted hundreds of other companies around the world to emulate this example, in the hope of building and preserving long-term wealth.
