Bitcoin’s time has come: Time Magazine adds BTC to its balance sheet

Institutional fund management company Grayscale has partnered with renowned New York magazine Time to produce an educational video series on the topic of crypto assets.

The partnership was announced in April by Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein, who revealed that Time and its president Keith Grossman would accept payments in Bitcoin.

In addition, Time does not plan to convert the bitcoins it obtains through the transaction into legal currency and will hold crypto assets on its balance sheet. So far, the two parties have not disclosed more details of the cooperation.

Excitingly, Grayscale is partnering with TIME to launch a new video series this summer explaining the crypto space. Just as important, @KeithGrossman and TIME have agreed to be paid in Bitcoin and keep Bitcoin on their balance sheet. This is a first for our media partnership! — Michael Sonnenshein (@Sonnenshein) April 12, 2021

Time magazine was first launched on March 3, 1923. The magazine and online publisher have been very active in the cryptocurrency space recently. In March, Time magazine took advantage of the NFT craze and launched a set of tokenized magazine covers on the NFT market SuperRare. Among them, the "TIME Space Exploration - January 19th, 1959" NFT was auctioned for 135 ETH on March 30, worth nearly $250,000.

Time also revealed that they were looking for a crypto-friendly chief financial officer, the same month they posted the position on LinkedIn.

"The media industry is evolving rapidly. Time is seeking a chief financial officer who can help guide the company's transformation," the job posting said.

According to Bitcointreasuries.com, Time will become the 33rd public company to hold Bitcoin on its balance sheet. Time joins the ranks of top American companies Microstrategy, which began investing billions of dollars in Bitcoin in August 2020, Square added 4,709 Bitcoins in October, and Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin in January. Multinational investment company BlackRock also began to dabble in cryptocurrencies in February this year, making a profit of more than $360,000 by going long using Bitcoin futures.

The deal marks an important collaboration between a major player in the mainstream and crypto space. Founded in 2013, Grayscale manages $46 billion worth of crypto assets, including about 3% of the total circulating supply of Bitcoin.