Ethan Peck has submitted a proposal to Meta, the social media company, to establish a Bitcoin treasury to hedge part of its $72 billion cash and short-term equivalents against inflation.
Peck indicated that Meta’s cash reserve is highly affected by inflation and could lose up to 28% of its cash assets. He urged that Bitcoin has performed well as a store of value over the past five years, beating bonds by almost 1,262%.
Peck also wrote in the proposal:
Mark Zuckerberg named his goats ‘Bitcoin’ and ‘Max.’ Meta director Marc Andreessen has praised Bitcoin and is also a director at Coinbase. Do Meta shareholders not deserve the same kind of responsible asset allocation for the Company that Meta directors and executives likely implement for themselves?
~Ethan Peck
Peck is not new to submitting such requests due to his professional background. He is part of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a renowned think tank in Washington, D.C., that promotes market policies to various institutions and relevant government agencies.
His agency, The National Center for Public Policy Research, has submitted similar proposals, including the Bitcoin treasury shareholder proposals to Microsoft and Amazon in 2024.
However, Peck has spelt out that his current proposal is submitted to Meta on behalf of his family’s shares. In his proposal, he justified his quest by leveraging submissions made by relevant entities. He said that BlackRock, Meta’s second-largest institutional shareholder, “advised that a 2% BTC allocation is reasonable.”
Most traditional tech firms are uncomfortable with establishing a Bitcoin reserve
The Washington, D.C. think-tank submission that recommended that Microsoft convert 1% of its $484 billion assets to Bitcoin didn’t succeed. At a December 10 meeting, Microsoft shareholders shot down the proposal via a vote.
A day before the Microsoft proposal was shut down, The National Center for Public Policy Research suggested the same BTC corporate treasury diversification strategy to Amazon shareholders. The outcome of the Amazon proposal will be announced in April 2025, when shareholders will meet to discuss several issues.
In the proposal, the organization argued that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) — a measure of inflation based on baskets of household goods — is a poor gauge of inflation and suggested that the true inflation rate is double the CPI.
Bitcoin’s volatility might be the reason tech firms are preventing themselves from allocating part of their cash assets into Bitcoin reserves. They fear that the move is risky and that they may lose their resources if they adopt it.
