Bitcoin’s Impact on Global Markets

Welcome to the 33rd Edition of The Bitcoin Newsletter

We are living through a paradigm shift. Bitcoin is no longer just a curiosity at the fringes of finance, it is penetrating every layer of global capital, from money to bonds, equities, and real estate. Its absolute scarcity and digital-native design are beginning to reshape how markets allocate capital, how risk and opportunity cost are assessed, and how wealth is preserved.

In this edition, I will explore Bitcoin’s economic and social impact through the lens of its influence on global markets.

Real estate, the world’s largest asset class, has long functioned as a bedrock of the financial system. But as bitcoin rises, the foundations of this dynamic are shifting. The way we think about collateral, saving, and long-term investment is being redefined, and the ripple effects will extend far beyond finance into culture, politics, architecture, and society itself.

This piece builds on the extensive writing process behind my forthcoming book Digital Real Estate. The journey has been rich with new insights, and I’m thrilled to share that the book will be released early next year with Bitcoin Magazine.

Many thanks to Bram Kanstein, whose feedback and discussions helped shape this piece.

Best regards,

Leon

DEEP DIVE

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Bitcoin’s Impact on Global Markets
Real estate is the world’s largest asset class and a cornerstone of the financial system, alongside Treasuries, equities, and other stores of value, shaping nearly all major market dynamics. Of the roughly $1000 trillion in total global assets, real estate accounts for an estimated $370 trillion, the largest share. This highlights how real estate drives economic growth and supports lending, credit, and banking activity.

Its scale gives it significant influence over interest rates and investment behavior, contributing to both perceived global economic stability and systemic risk.

While real estate offers utility and scarcity, it lacks the mobility, divisibility, liquidity, accessibility, and durability needed in a digital financial ecosystem, a role for which bitcoin was purpose-built.

Source: Global asset landscape - 2025 update, Jesse Myers, 2025

In 1971, the median sale price for a home in the United States was $28,000. Today, that figure has risen dramatically to $512,000 (Q2 2025), a reflection of the growing financialization of the asset class. Real estate, due to its scarcity, favorable financing options, and strong political support, including preferential tax treatment, regulatory exemptions, and mostly lenient environmental oversight, has become one of the most popular investment assets.

These policy choices incentivize continuous development and reinforce real estate’s appeal as a politically protected asset class. This has helped investors preserve wealth and outperform the rate of monetary debasement, but has also contributed to the significant rise in housing costs and elevated living expenses. This illustrates a broader misallocation of capital, where resources flow into inflating asset values rather than into productive uses.

Real estate will remain central to wealth creation and financial markets, but bitcoin’s superior store-of-value qualities position it to gradually accompany, and perhaps replace, real estate in this role. Demand for both will persist as people diversify their assets, though adoption of bitcoin will take time due to information gaps and uneven access to technology.

There are still people today without access to mobile phones or the internet, highlighting the challenges in widespread technology adoption. It will take time for understanding and acceptance of Bitcoin to occur.

While investment strategies will remain diverse, bitcoin’s superior monetary properties, liquidity, divisibility, accessibility, and seamless integration into a digital economy, position it to increasingly replace real estate as the primary store of value and collateral base. Its simplicity and ease of use could ultimately make it the default savings instrument.

With the emergence of bitcoin, the market has access to a scarce, non-governmental commodity that functions as near-perfect money, adopted voluntarily. As bitcoin assumes its role as a primary store of value and pristine collateral, real estate will gradually return to its utility value. The rising adoption of Bitcoin is closely tied to the ongoing digitalization of our world, with significant changes unfolding in communication, the workplace, and finance.

As these shifts continue to unfold, artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly significant role. Consider the ‘Magnificent 7’, the most dominant tech giants, including Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Nvidia, and Tesla, all harnessing AI as a foundational driver of innovation, productivity, and long-term growth.

Finance, as the sector most directly tied to monetary technology, is rapidly embracing AI. In 2023, the financial services industry invested approximately $35 billion in AI initiatives, with banking alone accounting for roughly $21 billion. In 2024, this momentum accelerated: global venture capital investment in AI companies surged to over $100 billion, more than double the previous year, and AI-focused startups accounted for nearly one-third of all global venture funding.

This wave of investments underscores the deepening commitment to AI as a driver of productivity, innovation, and operational efficiency. As it becomes increasingly embedded in everything from education and online interaction to social media, risk modeling, and asset allocation, its influence on financial decision-making and infrastructure will continue to grow.

This is particularly relevant for the Bitcoin network, which operates as a decentralized monetary network with its own currency, bitcoin, one that stands to benefit from, and contribute to, this accelerating technological transformation.

As AI-driven infrastructure advances, the need for a digitally native, borderless form of money becomes increasingly important, positioning bitcoin as a natural long-term fit. However, while bitcoin offers superior monetary properties, its current role is largely that of a long-term store of value.

Early in its monetization phase and amid accelerating fiat debasement, bitcoin’s rising purchasing power means it is more often held than spent. This is reflected in the steadily rising HODL rate: in 2011, just 29% of bitcoin had remained untouched for over a year; by 2025, that figure has more than doubled to over 60%, highlighting its growing role as a long-term savings asset.

While bitcoin is increasingly adopted as a store of value, driven by its absolute scarcity and its role as a hedge against inflation, fiat money and fiat-based crypto tokens, such as U.S. dollar stablecoins, remain, and are increasingly, widely used for everyday transactions.

Fiat-backed crypto tokens like Tether processed over $27 trillion in transactions in 2024 alone, more than Visa and Mastercard combined, while Bitcoin settled around $19 trillion over the same period, primarily in large, non-retail transfers. On a daily basis, stablecoins handle over $15 billion in transactions compared to Bitcoin’s $2–4 billion.

Their ease of use and price stability make stablecoins attractive for short-term spending, while bitcoin’s role is increasingly as a long term savings account and, for those who choose, a medium of exchange. The store-of-value function is ultimately derived from the medium-of-exchange function. After all, no one would willingly accept money for goods or services if they knew it would be worthless in the future, unless they were unaware of its decline or forced to use it.

The ability to store value is a fundamental property of money, forming the basis for exchange. Bitcoin has proven itself a superior store of value compared to fiat, leading people to spend fiat while saving in bitcoin. For now, fiat, whether in cash, electronic form, crypto, or fiat-backed crypto, still dominates payments, even in AI applications. Solana, for example, has positioned itself as an “AI currency”. Regardless, bitcoin continues to grow as a reserve asset, signaling a broader shift toward decentralized finance and its use as money.

Over the coming decades, perhaps even a century, bitcoin’s monetization will gradually unfold. As it becomes more widely held and less volatile, the opportunity cost of spending it will decline, making everyday use increasingly practical.

This progression mirrors the digitalization of the financial system and highlights bitcoin’s role across its three monetary functions: medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. Technological advances such as the Lightning Network already enable fast, low-cost transactions, well-suited for a digital economy where billions of devices will transact autonomously.

In this context, machine-to-machine payments may soon outpace human transactions, underscoring bitcoin’s long-term trajectory as the monetary foundation of an automated world.

While fiat currencies and stablecoins may serve a transitional role, the broader digitalization of money ultimately points to bitcoin as the superior monetary technology. AI-driven financial services can integrate bitcoin seamlessly, enabling autonomous systems to transact and interact without central oversight.

For example, in the energy sector, AI could aggregate real-time data from sensors and autonomously purchase information from decentralized marketplaces, with microtransactions instantly settled via the Lightning Network.

Bitcoin need not even be held by end-users to play this role; it can act as a behind-the-scenes settlement medium or as a direct means of payment, with flexibility across both consumer-facing and infrastructure-level applications.

In increasingly automated environments, this adaptability allows bitcoin to underpin efficient, resilient systems. While AI may carry human biases from its training data, its core purpose is to optimize efficiency, productivity, and progress free from ideological constraints.

In this context, Bitcoin and AI complement one another: Bitcoin provides the monetary infrastructure, while AI contributes to its refinement, from optimizing mining operations and energy demand forecasting to improving hardware efficiency and resource allocation.

Together, they form a synergy with the potential to reshape the global financial system and automation into a more intelligent and resilient order.

Beyond infrastructure and efficiency, AI is fundamentally reshaping how we interact with the world. A striking example is Michael Saylor’s use of AI to develop bitcoin-backed securities.

Instead of relying solely on traditional brainstorming sessions or lengthy and costly legal consultations, he openly shares that he engaged conversationally with AI to refine product concepts, passing only the final versions to lawyers for execution.

This reflects a broader transformation: AI, acting as a facilitator of collective intelligence, accelerates our ability to understand complex technologies like Bitcoin and translate them into practical applications.

This dynamic is equally visible among retail investors, who are showing faster and deeper understanding of emerging technologies. Several factors drive this shift, including broad access to information and the feedback loops of social media, now amplified by AI.

Through real-time insights, idea-sharing, and collaborative refinement via posts, podcasts, discussions, and direct AI interactions, individual investors and communities are leveraging these tools to spread knowledge globally and accelerate adoption.

In this way, AI is not just optimizing processes but decentralizing knowledge, enabling both individuals and companies to accelerate Bitcoin’s adoption as part of a broader technological shift.

Bitcoin, as a protocol and decentralized network, integrates seamlessly with foundational technologies like the internet, HTTP, and emerging breakthroughs in machine learning and large language models. These systems evolve in parallel, reinforcing and accelerating one another. Real estate, by contrast, cannot.

As a physical, indivisible, and immobile asset, it is poorly suited as money in a digitized world. Its role as a hedge against inflation in the fiat system arose by default rather than design, simply because no better alternative existed.

That real estate became a preferred store of value is not entirely illogical, however. This function reflects a historical carryover from the centrality of land as a source of wealth and power. Across cultures and history, land ownership has been tightly linked to influence, authority, and status.

Under Augustus (27 BCE – 14 CE), senators were required to hold land worth at least 250,000 denarii (the annual pay of 1,100 legionaries), roughly $38–50 million today. Land has always held value, but real estate’s modern prominence as a primary store of value is a historical anomaly. It reflects a deeper dissonance: forcing a physical, immovable asset into an increasingly electronic, and now fully digital, financial system. The result is inefficiency, friction, and fragility. Bitcoin closes this gap.

As digital money, it aligns with a dematerialized economy, offering the first credible solution to problems like inflation, declining purchasing power, rising living costs, and unaffordable housing, problems that are entirely human-made.

These are not inevitable, but self-inflicted outcomes of the prevailing monetary order. Bitcoin’s emergence in 2009 marked a structural break, providing a foundation not only for the digital age but also for healthier, sustainable growth, where work is rewarded and saving is possible. The contrast with real estate becomes clear when comparing the cost and efficiency of capital movement.

Real estate is indivisible, not instantly verifiable, and subject to physical decay. Transactions require notaries, brokers, taxes, and weeks of processing, creating friction and excessive costs.

By contrast, bitcoin can be liquidated instantly, verified in seconds, and transferred globally in minutes. Transactions worth billions can settle securely in about ten minutes for less than a dollar. Bitcoin is fully liquid, divisible to one hundred millionth of a coin (a satoshi), and free from the physical decay or geographic constraints of physical property.

The inefficiencies of real estate are staggering, not just in fees, taxes, and legal costs, but in wasted time. Settlements can drag on for weeks or months, while disputes over inheritance or divorce can lock assets for years, turning capital into conflict rather than productivity. Vast amounts of wealth end up frozen, siphoned off through administration, or simply lost, benefiting neither the economy nor society.

Bitcoin, like any asset, can become tied up in legal disputes if locked within contested ownership structures. In its early years, uncertainty around its legal treatment in inheritance or divorce cases led to complications.

I even heard of one case where a company bought bitcoin, but the CEO wrote the private key on paper and kept it himself. When a dispute arose, it escalated into a legal battle over whether the CEO, who physically held the key, or the company, which had funded the purchase, truly owned the bitcoin. Today, most major jurisdictions have clearer frameworks for handling such cases.

Because bitcoin is both divisible and programmable, it can be integrated into estate planning far more efficiently than real estate. This enables precise allocation among heirs, reduces disputes, and minimizes inefficiencies in the transfer of wealth.

By contrast, real estate as a monetary substitute creates broad socio-economic distortions. When property becomes a primary store of value and inflation hedge, investment demand drives prices beyond local incomes, inflating living costs and pushing housing out of reach. Over time, housing turns into a speculative asset and storefront for global capital, further undermining affordability. Bitcoin can take on this role instead. In fact, it is the ultimate speculative asset, and that’s not a weakness.

Speculation is intrinsic to human behavior: every decision, from starting a business to choosing how to spend time or money, involves speculation. Far from being destructive, speculation fuels inventiveness and sustains productivity, especially when channeled through bitcoin, rather than into housing or other basic needs.

Bitcoin’s influence will extend far beyond real estate. As money, the foundation of trade, saving, and financial planning, it will eventually intersect with virtually every sector of the economy and human interaction, with accelerating effects over time.

As its role in the global financial system expands, its unique characteristics will increasingly shape not only trade and finance but also human behavior itself. These dynamics will ripple through daily life, shaping how we save, invest, eat, think, and build, and fundamentally altering both the reasons for and the methods by which buildings and cities come into being.

Cultural, economic, and societal changes are unfolding alongside other paradigm shifts, most notably the rise of AI, which is reshaping how humans work, create, and interact. Amid failing monetary and social systems and persistent inflation, eroding savings, distorting markets, and widening inequality, humanity stands before some of the greatest opportunities in history, driven by technological breakthroughs like Bitcoin and AI.

If AI proves as disruptive as it promises to be, it could in fact strengthen the human spirit, because thriving in an AI-saturated world will demand more creativity, empathy, and originality, not less. AI is poised to replace countless monotonous white-collar roles that drain people of their vitality and reduce them to data-input machines.

Freed from this drudgery, people can dig deeper into their creativity, find inspiration, and use AI as a partner to bring their ideas to life. Far from diminishing us, AI may liberate human potential.

At the same time, as existing systems falter under accelerating technological efficiency, Bitcoin offers a neutral, incorruptible ledger through which the gains of that productivity can be stored, accessed, and shared.

The productivity unlocked by artificial intelligence can be captured and preserved in bitcoin, whose value is further amplified by the ongoing debasement of fiat currencies. As AI permeates the global economy, boosting output and lowering costs, the monetary premium will gravitate toward the hardest form of money available, accelerating bitcoin’s monetization.

To illustrate the scale of this opportunity, a friend told me how his grandparents bought a building in downtown Hamburg in the 1960s for 70,000 Deutsche Marks. Considered expensive at the time, it is now valued at around €7,000,000, equivalent to 14,000,000 Deutsche Marks after the 2:1 euro conversion in 2000, a two-hundredfold increase driven largely by inflation and productivity gains. This story underscores bitcoin’s vast potential.

As humanity becomes more productive, new wealth is created and seeks the hardest possible store of value. At the same time, the inflationary fiat system continues to produce weak money, pushing capital out of currency and into hard assets.

In the past, real estate absorbed much of this flow; today, that demand may increasingly be moving toward bitcoin, which is absolutely scarce rather than only relatively scarce. Real estate’s supply can expand and is further constrained artificially by zoning laws, whereas bitcoin is absolutely scarce.

Limited to 21 million, with global demand, instant transferability, and no borders, bitcoin represents the most compelling destination for global capital.

If real estate could rise 200-fold in the fifty years since 1971, why should bitcoin, an absolutely scarce, digital asset demanded by the entire world, not rise 1000-fold over the next fifty years? These are the questions I kept encountering throughout my work in the real estate industry and in countless conversations, which ultimately shaped the arguments in my forthcoming book Digital Real Estate.

Now in its final touches, the book has gained more and more depth along the way and will be released early next year with Bitcoin Magazine. In it, I explore how bitcoin’s rise, and its potential to replace real estate as part of the bedrock of the global financial system, could transform the economy and society at large.

WORTH TO KNOW

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Podcast and publications

How Bitcoin Changes the Way Humanity Saves and Lives | BTC Prague 2025My talk from this year’s BTC Prague is now online! I cover Bitcoin and real estate, its philosophical foundations, housing, Metaplanet, and how Bitcoin offers solutions to long-standing real-world challenges, with deeper societal impact. WATCH

Free Cities Podcast: The Real Estate Reckoning - Leon WankumMy longest conversation to date. We covered a wide range of themes including property market risks, Austrian economics, monetary expansion, the “inflation hedge” myth, free cities, proof-of-work, architecture, and Japan’s unique position in all of this. WATCHNiko Jilch: Bitcoin Masterclass (in German) - Leon WankumThe continuation of my conversation series with Niko Jilch. We discussed Bitcoin, treasury companies, AI, manipulation, and propaganda. WATCH #1 | WATCH #2 | WATCH #3**Bitcoin as benchmark is very hard to beat by Leon Wankum (SoB028)**In this episode with Johan Bergmann and co-hosts Francesco and Alessandro, we dive into how Bitcoin intersects with real estate, the rise of Bitcoin treasury companies, and the influence of Austrian economics on its adoption and value.WATCH

Bitcoin Real Estate Portfolio Estimator: Update
We’ve been refining the Bitcoin & Real Estate Portfolio Estimator, built to help real estate professionals understand how adding bitcoin into capital structures can strengthen returns and long-term sustainability. TRY THE MODEL

IDEAS OF INTEREST

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Inside MSTR’s bitcoin playbook with CJ – CJ from Strategy’s bitcoin treasury team reveals how the world’s largest BTC treasury is reshaping capital markets, the KPI that matters most, and why beating bitcoin long term is the only benchmark. WATCH

B4E 2025: True North Presents: Bitcoin Backed Credit – Jeff Walton and Mason Foard They unpack “Bitcoin Backed Credit”—from MSTR-style securities and capital structure dynamics to liquidity, transparency, and why Bitcoin-backed instruments are too good for fixed-income managers to ignore. WATCH
Bitcoin Treasury Companies: Year One with Michael Saylor – Saylor shows why Bitcoin treasury companies are the next wave of institutional adoption—transforming digital capital into digital credit and yield while mapping a Bitcoin-first path to fix banks, funds, and markets. WATCH

Bitcoin Credit 101 with Michael Saylor, Jeff Walton and Matt Cole – reveal how Bitcoin treasuries are rewriting credit—pairing perpetual preferreds with Bitcoin’s infinite duration, reshaping yield, risk, and ratings as digital credit threatens to eat junk bonds. WATCHMichael Saylor: The Bitcoin Treasury Endgame - Michael Saylor on the future of global credit markets with bitcoin at their core. WATCH

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If you want to support me. Feel free. You can send me some satoshi/bitcoin.

Lightning: [email protected]

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Resources

Amortization.org – US Home Prices in 1971 Adjusted for Inflation VISIT

FRED St. Louis Fed – U.S. Interest Rate Time Series VIEWStatista – Artificial Intelligence in Finance VISIT

Crunchbase News – Global Funding Data Analysis: AI (EOY 2024) READ

Bitcoin Magazine Pro – 1-Year HODL Wave CHART

Cointelegraph – Stablecoins Beat Visa and Mastercard in 2024 Volume READ

Cointelegraph – $19 Trillion Transactions Settled on Bitcoin Network in 2024 READ

Econofact – The Rise of Stablecoins and How to Regulate Them READ

Michael Saylor and Phong Le - The Transformative Power of Bitcoin and AI WATCHWikipedia – Equites VISIT

Marty Bent – Tweet on Bitcoin & Financial Commentary READ

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Photo Credit: Fight Club (1999)

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Disclaimer: the content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. Make sure you do your own research before making any investment and be aware of your own risk tolerance. If you like to build on my thoughts, feel free, but please cite me as the source. 2025 - Leon Wankum. 

Editing and content creation by Clemens Haidinger.

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