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Michael Saylor argued that the inability of Bitcoin to maintain the most aggressive upward forecasts is less about a broken long-term thesis and more about the tightness of the credit market: a large part of the wealth of Bitcoin is still not financed within the traditional banking system, pushing its holders into “shadow” places, which creates effective pressure to sell.
In a Feb. 27 interview with Coin Stories host Natalie Brunell, Saylor said the market has matured in a natural way that naturally reduces upside and downside volatility as derivatives migrate “from offshore to onshore” and regulated U.S. markets grow. But he put a sharper price brake on the credit pipeline. Banks, he said, are moving slowly to recognize Bitcoin as collateral, and that delay is important when the asset base is large.
Saylor described the current market structure as roughly “$2 trillion worth of Bitcoin,” with “probably $1.8 trillion held by retail investors or offshore investors” who “don’t have access to the traditional banking system.” The practical implication, he said, is that Bitcoin holders looking to unlock liquidity face a narrow menu compared to a traditional stock portfolio.
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“If I were to issue $10 million in Apple stock with JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley, I could get $5 million in debt from SOFR plus 50 basis points and I could spend it,” Saylor said. “But you can’t even issue $10 million in Bitcoin with JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley. So you can’t get a loan. So you have to go to the shadow banking system. You have to go offshore.”
This limitation, he said, forces owners to behave mechanically. The “safe way” to make money is simply to sell, which “wets the top”. The next option is to borrow from a small pool of crypto lenders who don’t reaffirm collateral, but Saylor described that market as both expensive and rare — “probably several billion dollars” — at rates he described closer to “SOFR plus 400” or “plus 500 basis points,” rather than traditional style spreads.
He pointed to a newer channel, banks lending against Spot Bitcoin ETFs, such as the BlackRock iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), but described it as early, limited and still more expensive than traditional secured lending.
The most controversial way, Saylor said, is where the cheapest funding can be found: counterparties offering low-cost Bitcoin loans in exchange for control of the collateral. “I’ve had people offer me bitcoin loans at 1% or 0%,” he said, before highlighting the business. “There’s always one thing (…) they want me to transfer the Bitcoin to them so they can revalidate it.”
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Saylor then linked rehypothecation directly to spot market pressures, arguing that collateral given to intermediaries could effectively be “sold” through multiple re-hypothecations. “So if you have $10 million (…) you can get a 3 or 4% loan, but then it’s refinanced,” he said. “So your $10 million worth of Bitcoin is sold once, sold twice, sold three times (…) You can actually generate 30 or 40 million dollars worth of sales because the Bitcoin that you released (…) repeated it three times.”
Michael Saylor: ‘Shadow Banking’ Is Driving Bitcoin Price Down
On February 27, 2026, in an interview with Natalie Brunell, Michael Saylor discussed why Bitcoin could not exceed $126,000.
He suggested that removing Bitcoin from traditional banks like JP… pic.twitter.com/ODpOEvhi2j
– Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) March 4, 2026
In his view, the missing piece is a large, regulated, non-recurring credit system for Bitcoin – one that is more akin to mainstream securities financing. “What’s holding back the price? I think what’s holding back the asset price is the lack of a fully formed indirect credit system,” he said, adding that rehypothecation “depresses volume” and could increase movement on both sides through leveraged positioning.
Saylor’s bottom line was time, not a thesis: if banks take the full meaning of “banking it” “four years, 5 years, 6 years”, then the discovery of the price of Bitcoin will be shaped by the solution of credit shadows that can produce synthetic supply. If and when the traditional credit rails around bitcoin collateral mature without aggressive refinancing, he suggested, the market could rely less on forced sales and more on simple collateralized borrowing, potentially changing the ceiling in upward cycles.
At press time, Bitcoin was at $72,236.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
