In a Tuesday earnings call, executives at Palantir Technologies confirmed that the company might follow in the footsteps of electric car company Tesla by accepting bitcoin as payment for its services.
At the same time, the firm could add BTC to its balance sheet, making it the latest publicly traded U.S. company to go down that route.
Per a tweet by CNBC’s Josh Lipton, Palantir Tech execs literally said they’re open to accepting Bitcoin from customers and that they are thinking about it and having discussions internally about adding BTC to their balance sheet.
Palantir Tech, with its headquarters in Denver, Colorado, was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Alex Karp. It focuses on big data analytics and has three popular projects, Palantir Gotham, Palantir Metropolis, and Palantir Foundry.
In its recent quarterly earnings call, Palantir Tech, which grew its business mainly from lucrative government deals for its data analytics software, reported a 49% revenue growth for its first quarter, a record above Wall Street estimates.
Its earnings were 4 cents per adjusted share and revenue at 49% to $341.2 million. The record was above the estimated earnings of 4 cents a share on revenue of $332.2 million. Palantir plans to increase its revenue to $360 million in its second quarter, and annual revenue growth of 30% or more for 2021 through 2025.
The publicly traded American software company, like other institutions, will hope that accepting Bitcoin from customers and possibly adding the crypto asset to its balance sheet could help improve its profits and attract new clients.
Although talks of Palantir buying Bitcoin are still under deliberation, they have the successes of MicroStrategy, Square, and Tesla to borrow a leaf from.
Tesla started its Bitcoin journey with a $1.5 billion purchase, as well as launching Bitcoin payment options for US customers buying its cars or products in addition to the traditional card payment option.
In its last earnings call, Tesla revealed that it still had $2.5 billion worth of bitcoin in its balance sheet after selling about 10% of its bitcoin, a decision taken to prove liquidity of Bitcoin as an alternative to holding cash on the balance sheet, according to CEO, Elon Musk.
By holding Bitcoin in its balance sheet, Tesla increased its revenue by roughly $100 million after selling just 10% of its total holdings, and even other companies yet to liquidate their BTC holdings are already in considerable profits.
Will Palantir eventually buy Bitcoin to boost expected earnings and revenue? Only time will tell.
