In an interview with BTC Sessions, MicroStrategy executive chairman Michael Saylor projected that Bitcoin’s base layer will evolve into an institutional settlement rail dominated by the world’s largest banks, technology platforms and sovereign actors. Responding to a forward‑looking question about how ordinary users will interact with Bitcoin over the coming years, Saylor sketched a future in which direct on‑chain activity becomes the province of “mega” institutions while retail usage migrates to layered infrastructure.
Big Tech And Nations Will Dominate Bitcoin
“I could see a world where every major bank and every major tech corp, maybe a Google and an Apple and a Microsoft… they’re all settling or moving large amounts of Bitcoin around on the base layer,” Saylor said. He added that “the biggest users of the base layer would be Apple and Google and the US and Bank of China and Bank of Russia and Bank of England,” alongside global commercial banks such as Citi, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Santander, Deutsche Bank, Swiss banks and the Bank of Japan.
In that scenario, he continued, “Cit[i] would be moving billions of dollars of Bitcoin” among large financial counterparties, and “Microsoft will move billions and tens of billions of [dollars of] Bitcoin between Microsoft and Google in order to work through some… technical issue.” Payment networks would also participate: “Visa, any of the payment networks, they’ll have massive amounts of Bitcoin.”
Saylor framed the prospective structure of the ecosystem as stratified. The base network, he said, would ultimately host “10 to 100,000 big financial institutions… settling large amounts,” with dramatically higher transaction counts pushed to scaling layers: the Lightning Network as a “high‑speed, high‑frequency” Layer 2 stitching together potentially “a 100,000 or a million websites or a million mobile apps,” and above that a competitive field of custodial or semi‑open “layer 3” networks operated by exchanges, fintechs and consumer platforms such as “Coinbase… Cash App… Visa… Microsoft and Apple and Apple Pay.” In Saylor’s view, these Layer 3 environments could support billions of transactions, while end users interface with Bitcoin primarily through those intermediated services rather than by broadcasting base‑layer transactions themselves.
The executive chairman emphasized that today’s individual node operators and self‑custodians are “early pioneers,” asserting that, as institutional settlement gains primacy, some of those early adopters who maintain their positions could become “insanely rich,” whereas those who divest prematurely may later view that decision as “unfortunate.” His forecast rests on the assumption that Bitcoin should be treated as “digital capital” rather than day‑to‑day currency, with corporations and governments leveraging it as a long‑term reserve asset and settlement medium while fiat‑denominated instruments continue to function for pricing and transactional liquidity at higher layers.
Saylor’s comments extend his well‑known thesis that Bitcoin’s maturation will be driven less by retail speculation and more by structural integration into global capital and payment systems. In the institutional end state he described, the presence of large technology companies, major commercial and central banks, and governments moving “large amounts of Bitcoin” on‑chain would mark a shift in who directly touches the base protocol—an evolution he portrays as the logical consequence of Bitcoin’s consolidation as a neutral, high‑value settlement layer beneath a dense fabric of scaling and custodial services
At press time, BTC traded at $117,363.
