YouTube Rival Rumble Reveals First Bitcoin Reserve Buy

Video platform Rumble on Monday announced its first Bitcoin buy, less than two months after revealing a strategy to put the cryptocurrency on its balance sheet.

Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that the company bought its first Bitcoin on Friday.

It isn’t clear how much Bitcoin that Rumble bought, but the company said in November that it would allocate up to $20 million of its cash reserves into the asset. Decrypt inquired with Rumble but did not receive an immediate response.

“It won’t be the last,” Pavolvski wrote about the Friday buy.

Rumble is a Canadian company that allows users to post videos. A rival to YouTube, it trades on the Nasdaq (NASDAQ: RUM) and prides itself on supporting free speech. The platform is popular with American conservatives. 

Back in November, Pavolvski said that the world was “still in the early stages of the adoption of Bitcoin.”

The platform is gaining support from the crypto world, too: Stablecoin issuer Tether said in December that it would invest $775 million in the company platform, starting with a $250 million cash plug. Tether company works to mint USDT, the fourth biggest cryptocurrency by market cap. 

Rumble is following in the footsteps of software company MicroStrategy, which has been buying Bitcoin since 2020 as a strategy to get the best returns for shareholders. 

MicroStrategy now holds 450,000 Bitcoin—today worth $46.3 billion, at today’s price of nearly $103,000—and urges other companies to buy the asset as a long-term store of value. 

Edited by Andrew Hayward