In June 2025, I had the pleasure of speaking at BTC Prague for the second time. My talk explored how Bitcoin challenges real estate’s role as a store of value—and why Bitcoin is set to reshape the entire capital structure of the real estate industry, from financing and asset management to architectural design and rental dynamics.
Below, you’ll find the video recording, the full transcript, and the presentation slides.
I hope you find it insightful and inspiring.
Watch Full Keynote
Keynote Transcript
Thank you guys. Um, hey, it’s a pleasure to be back at Bitcoin Prague. It’s my second time. I really enjoy the conference and the high signal here. There’s no bullshitting and I’m uh proud to be part of it. And some of you guys might know me. I talk about Bitcoin and real estate quite a lot. And a lot of people ask me, Leon, if Bitcoin is a better store of value than real estate, why do you keep talking about it? The reason I keep talking about it is because Bitcoin changes an industry does not mean that industry will go away. And the relationship between real estate and Bitcoin is particularly interesting because real estate serves as a monetary substitute because of monetary inflation that has decimated people’s purchasing power and together with the US 10-year Treasury. It pretty much forms the bedrock of the global financial system. Once you become aware that Bitcoin is a superior store of value, we also understand that it will most likely replace the 10-year US Treasury fixed income in general and real estate as the bedrock of the global financial system. And once we understand Bitcoin as this pristine form of collateral as well which real estate is being used also I think it’s pretty interesting to look at the real estate industry and then understand how Bitcoin is changing every layer of it because that is going to happen to every single industry. The real estate industry is being affected first because it’s a dominant store of value but every industry will be affected by Bitcoin because it’s near perfect money as money generally speaking. It’s the very base of trade and it will penetrate every industry, every sector and every capital structure. So personally realizing what industries are affected by Bitcoin is constantly changing and the adoption of Bitcoin is happening at different levels than I expected. So I came to realize that because our monetary system has been broken for so long, Bitcoin is being adopted as money first and then later as a transaction system, right? And um because Bitcoin reprices risk and it reprices opportunity cost. If I have a line of business, I have to ask myself, is this line of business more profitable than just putting money into Bitcoin? that opportunity cost itself reprices everything and I’ll later go talk about real estate in detail but quickly mentioning it when you look at real estate what is real estate what is involved with real estate right there’s demand for real estate because it’s a store of value Bitcoin is a better store of value you have to build maintenance reserves in order to maintain your property there’s no better money than Bitcoin to build inflation resistant maintenance reserves you have to finance the property Bitcoin is a pristine form of collateral and treasury asset that also real estate investors, developers and builders generally speaking can make use of and then also we have the asset management side that includes heating and bitcoin mining which I will elude a bit later helps to save energy cost and now when we think about what industries will be affected by bitcoin in retrospect I think it’s pretty logical that the first company that adopted a bitcoin tre Treasury standard successfully was a business intelligence firm because if you think about it without Bitcoin business intelligent is actually not possible. Fiat money created a calculation problem. That is something that Luton Mises alluded on. It basically says that unound money gives unound price signals. Money’s information. Who owns what? What is the cost of what? If we have unound money, we have a calculation problem and high expanded of that. prices disperse information in the economy. Unsound money, unound price signals. So by adopting a Bitcoin standard and replacing the fiat reserves with Bitcoin strategy was able to restore clarity. It’s not just the business intelligence sector or the real estate market or finance that is going to be affected by Bitcoin. Every industry is going to be affected by Bitcoin because without Bitcoin, without sound money, you’re not able to observe insights, digest insights, and share them properly and you can’t make good decisions. Right? Once you start building your company around Bitcoin, Bitcoin becomes a guiding principle that helps you maneuver the fiat jungle. So I feel I’ve been interested in Bitcoin for a long time and what got me interested in Bitcoin was the ability to build a parallel society and Bitcoin is based on the idea what is known as agorism. Samuel Conkin was someone that is very much known for teaching about it. I can suggest you watching some of his talks. is an interesting individual and the idea is you build a parallel system based on free market activity to replace a totarian system in a peaceful way and that is also why the use of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange has high relevance even though from an economic perspective it could seem that spending Bitcoin is irrational because the opportunity cost of spending Bitcoin today is that you give up on the price increase of Bitcoin tomorrow but having the ability to bypass the existing system by itself is the reason why Bitcoin exists. Doesn’t mean you have to spend your Bitcoin, but the ability that you can in itself is the reason why Bitcoin exists. And um the goal of liberalism of classical liberalism is the peaceful cooperation of all people. Right? Liberalism in the classical sense is very different from what we understand as liberalism today. So classic liberalism has its origin and in Austria and in England partly in France and Germany as well even though those countries tend tended toward a more of a socialist um political system but the idea is and KL Manga who’s also the founding father of the Austrian school of economics who is also in my opinion somebody that definitely inspired the creation of Bitcoin because he understood sound money principles. um he placed emphasis on individual action and then Mises later on expanded on that because the modern social sciences and what came to be known as sociology today is politicized. It’s not what classical liberalist understood as sociology. So Mises came up with the term prexiology. Praxiology looks at human action and it very much thinks that individual decisionm is better than central planning. modern society has forgot what classical liberalism means. And I think that most of you are aware of the tower of babel. So it’s a biblical story in the book of Genesis that in the land of Sheena which is Babylon or modernday Baghdad and ancient Sumemer uh people were trying to build a tower to reach heavens and they were dispersed by God giving them different languages. And today we have networks like Bitcoin. We also have AI as a universal language that helps humanity to reconnect through their minds and through energy based system rather than being dispersed and working against each other. And because Bitcoin is sound money, the discussion on how it’s being spent in my opinion is not important because sound money is being adapted where it’s needed most. And in the less industrialized world, Bitcoin is being adopted as a medium of exchange. But in the industrialized world, it’s being adopted as capital. It’s being adopted as money in its essence. But we have forgot what money is. And we use monetary substitutes like real estate and fixed income. And this becomes very relevant when we look into the asset class of real estate. What is real estate? Once we understood there’s a financialization process in the asset class. The asset class has become a capital structure, right? Real estate is used as money. Bitcoin is going to replace real estate in that form. And because of that, it’s affecting every layer in that capital structure. We could do that for every industry. But Bitcoin will affect the way that we store value, the way that we manage assets, the way that we deal with cash flow, the way that we deal with energy as a whole, and it will also affect the way that we finance ventures. And I want to quickly touch on MetaPlanet and the real estate investment case of Japan because I think Japan is a country that has seen tremendous growth in the 80s and with that came a real estate boom. There were low interest rates and people funneled their money into real estate and then suddenly over the past 20 years interest rates stayed low but what happened was the demographic change. Right? There’s less children being prawn which is not really a problem because of automization. Most of the jobs are anyway not existent anymore that these people in the past did. So I’m not saying here that the demographic change is a huge problem. It’s being made into a problem. But what happened in Japan is real estate lost its function as a store of value. But there’s still the investment case and most of you are aware of the company MetaPlanet. It was founded as red planet in 1999 by Simon Garavic in Thailand. It was a hotel business and he then led the entry into the Japanese market and during co most of the business came to a standstill. He learned about Bitcoin and then they made a decisive pivot into Bitcoin. They sold most of their hotel assets. They kept one, took a loan against the hotel, issued more stock, bought more Bitcoin and over the past year, it’s been the most successful stock of the past 12 in both 18 months. And the reason is what Metapanet came to understand the business model that centered around real estate using real estate as an inflation hedge and then leveraging it to buy more real estate actually works much better with Bitcoin. And I want to quickly guide you through the investment cycle to help understand how much better saving eventually, but today it’s still classified as investing works with Bitcoin because you ask have you ask yourself if we understand that real estate is going to collapse to its utility value, we have to ask ourselves is real estate investing in the classical sense actually worth it? And during a real estate phase, usually there’s a fundraising phase where you go and take on debt, right? Usually you bring in equity around 20 to 30% of a project or you bring knowledge on how to build and a capital partner brings the equity. Then you go fund raise from a bank. So then you raise another 60 70 80% of the project cost through a bank. Then you start building. That building phase can be two to three years. It’s very risky. And then the letting phase sets in. If you’re not able to let the building and rent it out, how are you going to sell it and how are you going to maintain it? So there’s huge risk that you’re taking on to build real estate and the investment cycle is very long. It can take up to 5 years. So now we look at the case of MetaPlanet. So, Metal Planet had actually a very specific situation because due to the Mount Gaus collapse in Japan, Bitcoin is not really trusted by the regulators and there’s a over 50% tax on Bitcoin. Whereas, if you hold a stock, there’s around 20% taxes and then if you hold a stock in a Nissa account, which is a tax efficient account, you have a threshold of, I believe, 15 to $20,000 a year that you can save taxfree. So now MetaPlanet became the vehicle for a huge market which is Japan to get exposure to Bitcoin. And the way that they manage it is they hold Bitcoin in the treasury. Once the equity once the stock moves up and it’s worth more than the Bitcoin that they hold, they refinance that gap. They sell equity for worth more Bitcoin than they hold and they take whatever they get and they put that into Bitcoin. And they do it over a period of round about two to three days in a bull market. Now think about that. In a real estate bull market, you need five years to complete a project. With Bitcoin, you need two days. And Meta Planet was able to execute 60 Bitcoin buys in the 12 last 12 months and they’ve been doubling their Bitcoin stack round about every 60 days as well. So once you see that, you understand that classical investing in real estate does not make sense anymore. And with MetaPlanet, whatever you think about it, you can think it’s a bad thing. You can think it’s a good thing. But I just want you to think about the following. Now you can invest your money without driving up the cost of housing. And I think that’s a good thing, right? Like in the past, if you invested in real estate, there was a negative secondary order effect. That effect is if you put your money into real estate, it will be more expensive to for other people to find living space. Secondly, I think Metaplanet can help restore trust into the asset class of of Bitcoin in a market that lost trust due to Mount Gauss and malicious behavior back in the day. And there’s a positive network effect as well. So, as more Bitcoin is being absorbed by these companies, there’s less Bitcoin available. And nobody needs to live in a Bitcoin Fed to grow up in value. You just need higher demand. Once we understand, I want to tie it back into real estate now because I feel real estate as this monetary substitute and as this capital structure that is now being repriced around its utility value really serves as a of a great example of how Bitcoin can help align incentives along the capital structure of every industry and help each individual partner. So it’s very obvious if you’re a developer and you include bitcoin into a project you juice your returns right. So imagine for example you come as a developer you don’t bring into money to the project you find a capital partner who that provides you with money you find a bank they provide you with a loan you start the project if you include bitcoin in the project rather by taking on a larger loan to buy bitcoin or to build maintenance reserves there’s a higher return right so you get an equity stake in the real estate for building it and you also get exposure to bitcoin whoever gives you the money for the project will also be happy that you included Bitcoin. Same goes for the bank. It’s also true for the architect because holding Bitcoin in a real estate project means there’s more time to think about beautiful things, right? Leisure is very important for cultural development. And I personally can say there’s very little time to build beautiful houses because you need to make money. You need to sell it quickly in order to deal with the higher inflation rates that increase maintenance and construction cost. So there’s very little time to build beautiful architecture. And lastly for the tenant, there’s a positive effect as well by relying on Bitcoin and its increase in purchasing power. Owners, landlords of real estate don’t have to constantly raise rents. I think that is an underestimated positive secondary order effect of Bitcoin particularly in its relationship to real estate. And what I did here, I gave you a slide that writes down the Bitcoin strategies for real estate developers. And I quickly want to guide you through the phases. So the phase number one is the capitalization phase, recapitalizing with Bitcoin. What you can do, you can divest tax advantaged real estate. Meaning if you hold real estate, you can sell it tax-free. Think about putting it into Bitcoin if you want to. This is no investment advice, but be aware there’s an absolutely scar store of value that compounds in purchasing power faster than any asset humanity has ever experienced. You can refinance properties that you want to keep. In the US, you can do it tax-free. Refinance properties maybe you don’t want to sell, maybe you can’t sell. Buy Bitcoin, recapitalize with Bitcoin. The second phase is the hatching and performance improvement, right? You can hedge construction cost which are going up with inflation. Of course, rather than always having to raise rents, you can rely on Bitcoin. And you can also hedge inflation of your cash flow in your treasury with Bitcoin and you can unlock some geopolitical arbitrage. So you could start a real estate project in the country. Let’s assume there’s a war breaking out. If the bitcoin that are part of this real estate project are held with keys on different in different countries potentially different continents you unlock geopolitical arbitrage. You take those bitcoin in the case of conflict you leave raise a portion of your capital in satoshi not just fiat make it a thing every dollar that you raise think about should I put a few percentage points maybe it’s 100 basis points maybe it’s 2 3%. But start stacking bitcoin with the money you raise. This is also true for founders. If you do that, the moment you go public or the moment you raise large sums of money, you’ll have to give up less of your equity stake because the bitcoin will have grown in value so much that you need less money for your business venture. Meaning you can keep more of the shares. And uh I also believe that efficient resource allocation is bitcoin is a great tool for that. I mentioned mining. There are some companies here that presenting their mining technology. Think about it like that. Housing is very energy intensive. With mining, you can save on costs. And of course, if you want to align incentives even with your tenants, you can allow them to pay in Bitcoin. And uh what I think is important for myself to understand, it’s not just making use of Bitcoin as some sort of tool. It’s actually using Bitcoin to boost whatever you do. Because if you anchor whatever you do in Bitcoin and Bitcoin starts starts to shoot up, everything you do benefits from that as well. So in addition to taking Bitcoin in as payment, think about anchoring it as the capital base of whatever you do, it’s also true for the individual. And I’ve built a tool here that you guys can use at home if you like. So the website is called digitalrealestate.org. And we built this website to help people understand how including Bitcoin into real estate investing helps to um of course boost the performance that helps a normie to understand what’s the use case of Bitcoin. But the idea pretty much is that you can unlock geopolitical arbitrage. That’s energy efficiency. Bitcoin works as collateral that you can lend against to maintain your properties. So what you do with Bitcoin, you make yourself more independable of other people. In real estate, the volatility is dependent on external factors. War, natural disasters, interest rates. Bitcoin is a little bit more plannable, right? You pretty much know the hing cycles and it allows to plan better for the future. And this model is it’s based on the power law. But what we did, we also added different volatility scenarios to help people understand how the Bitcoin having cycle works. Yes, guys, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it. And um if you like, I have a newsletter that you find on Substack. I have a website, leonvank.com. And you find me on Twitter, Nostra. And finally, my book, Digital Real Estate, is being released uh in Q4 of this year. Looking forward to that.
April 2025 Tweet von @leonwankum
— Leon Wankum (@leonwankum) May 19, 2025
