Where does each holding come from?
Most often from the documents the company filed with its regulator. When a company that owns Bitcoin publishes a quarterly or annual report, the amount it holds is tagged inside that report in a machine readable form, and that tag is what this site reads. Nothing here is copied from another tracker.
Where a figure is not from a filing, it comes from a government's own published total, or from a statement published by the company or by a company that owns it. A figure worked out rather than stated is labelled estimated, as explained below.
Every figure names the document it came from, and links to it wherever the document has an address you can open, so you can find the same number in it. If we cannot point at a document, the number does not go on the page.
- Filings opened
- 5,171
- every document these companies have filed since we started tracking them
- Filings that stated a holding
- 310
- most filings a company makes have nothing to do with Bitcoin
- Companies with a daily history
- 48 of 66
- the rest are counted in the totals and are not yet linked
What do the evidence words mean?
Every holding carries one word saying who is accountable for the figure. The word answers that question and no other: how exactly the company stated the number, and how we lifted it off the page, are said separately beside it.
- confirmed
- The company filed this number with its regulator, under its own signature.
- reported
- The company or government said it publicly, on a channel we have checked is really theirs.
- attested
- An outside firm, an auditor or a custodian, checked the holding and put its name to it.
- chain verified
- We counted the coins ourselves on the Bitcoin network, at the addresses the holder publishes.
- attributed
- Somebody else reported it and named the company, and the company has not said it itself.
- estimated
- A figure worked out from what is known, not one anybody published.
A company that rounds its holding to the nearest hundred coins is still confirmed, with the rounding said next to it. Rounding is a fact about the sentence the company wrote, not a reason to doubt that it wrote it.
Which numbers did a person or a computer decide?
Almost none of them. The great majority of holdings on this site are read by machine out of a tagged filing, and nobody chooses what they say.
Two smaller groups are different, and this is the part worth reading carefully. Some companies do not file in a form a machine can read, so somebody reads the document and writes the figure down. And a few holdings are worked out rather than stated, which the page labels estimated and shows as a range.
Those two groups are reviewed with the help of a language model, and a language model can be wrong. It can misread a sentence, attach a figure to the wrong date, or take a number a company mentioned in passing for the number it actually holds. Every row it touches still keeps a link to the document, so a mistake is one click from being caught, and telling us is the fastest way to fix one.
The language-model review applies to the reviewed and the estimated rows only. It does not apply to a holding read out of a regulator filing, which is what the word confirmed on a row means.
A few figures that would otherwise wait for that review are accepted by a fixed rule instead, with no person and no language model involved. The rule only ever carries forward a figure we already accepted. A company's own notice passes when it repeats that figure with a newer date, or when its own sums add up: the figure we accepted, plus the coins the notice says were bought since, comes to exactly the new total it states. A government that publishes its wallet addresses passes when the full history of those wallets still comes to the figure we accepted, and the new figure is no lower and no more than one percent higher. Anything else waits for review.
How are the money figures worked out?
What the coins are worth is the company's holding multiplied by one Bitcoin price, the same price for every company on the page, on the day the page says it priced them.
What the company is worth is its share price at the last close multiplied by the number of shares it most recently told its regulator it had. Both dates are printed, because a share count is filed once a quarter and a share price moves every day.
Paid for every dollar of Bitcoin divides what the company is worth by what its coins are worth. Above one means the market is paying more for the company than its Bitcoin alone is worth; below one means less.
Company value including debt takes what the company is worth, adds its debt and any preferred stock, and takes off its cash. It only appears where a recent filing states each of those as one figure. Many of these companies state their debt in pieces instead, and adding those pieces up would be our arithmetic rather than theirs, so we leave it out and say so.
Preferred stock is shares that get paid back before ordinary ones, so what its holders are owed counts like debt. A company that says it has none counts as none. A company that has some and does not state what its holders are owed gets no figure at all, because counting that as nothing would make it look cheaper than it is.
Days to cover asks how long the company would need to keep buying at its recent pace before its Bitcoin was worth what the market is paying for the whole company.
Why is a number sometimes missing?
Because we would rather leave a gap than fill it. A blank on these pages always has a reason next to it, and these are the common ones.
No US listing. We read closing share prices from US exchanges. A company listed only in Tokyo or London has a real share price and we do not publish one for it.
No share count filed. Without the number of shares there is nothing to multiply a share price by.
The shares counted are not the shares traded. A company from outside the United States that lists in New York often trades a receipt that stands for many of its shares at once, while its filings count the shares themselves. Multiplying one by the other would be out by however many shares the receipt stands for, so we do not publish a value until we have read that number.
The share count is too old. A company says how many shares it has only when it files a report. We use the newest count it has filed and we print how old that count is. Once a company is past the day its next report was due, we stop using the old one, because by then we would be asserting a number rather than reading one. A company that reports every quarter gets a quarter. A company that reports once a year gets a year.
The company states its debt in pieces. Deciding which pieces count as debt is a judgement, and one made wrongly makes a company look cheaper than it is.
The company has preferred stock and does not say what it is owed. The value including debt needs that figure, and a company with a large amount of preferred stock would look far cheaper without it, so that one figure is left blank while the rest of the page stays.
How often does this change?
The holdings are rebuilt every day. New filings are collected through the day as regulators publish them, share prices are read after the US close on trading days, and the pages update when something moves.
A flat line on a company's chart almost always means no published figure is dated inside that stretch, not that nothing happened. The line moves on the day a figure describes, which for a quarterly report is weeks before the report comes out, and most companies do not publish a new figure often.
