Overstock boss ‘still in the game’ as he dumps stock

Patrick Byrne, the CEO of US online retailer Overstock, has sold 10% of his shares.

“I’ve cashed in 1/10 of my chips (most of it, to reinvest next to you),” Byrne said in an open letter to shareholders this week. “Don’t worry, I’m still in the game, and we’re going to bring this House to its knees.” He signed it “your humble servant”.

According to a form 4 SEC filing, he dumped around $15.8 million worth of shares as of Thursday and Friday, and then $4.9 million worth on Monday, totalling more than $20 million. Overstock, the first major retail company to accept Bitcoin as a payment method, subsequently saw its share price fall 12%.

The cash will be used to “fund sidecar investments with the company,” and will be reinvested in Overstock and its subsidiary Medici Ventures. “Thus, I am eating a double dose of my own cooking, as months ago I promised you I would” (Byrne first disclosed plans to sell stock in a March SEC filing).

Blame Bitcoin

Overstock’s stock is down significantly this year, something Byrne blames in part on struggling cryptocurrencies.

“I sadly note that over the last 180 days the correlation between OSTK’s and Bitcoin’s daily movements has been 85.5%, and again warn people: we don’t have significant holdings of Bitcoin,” he said.

Tackling poverty

In June, Coin Rivet reported that Overstock had team with Peruvian economist, Hernando De Soto, to tackle poverty around the world with blockchain technology.

“We are going to change the world with blockchain. Hernando and I intend to use blockchain technology to empower and enfranchise the five billion people who live outside formal economies within five years,” said Byrne. “When we first started taking Bitcoin, I said back then, four years ago, the main event of Bitcoin isn’t Bitcoin; it’s this thing called blockchain.”

A joint venture, DeSoto, aims to develop a global property registry system to surface the property rights of billions of people in the developing world. “What works in the United States, the most successful, prosperous and probably democratic country in the world, should be extendable to the rest of the universe and we can do it with blockchain technology,” De Soto said. “I envision a world in which people with rights to their property and business assets pull themselves — and their communities — out of poverty.”

He added: “About 80% of the world’s population is unable to enter into the modern global economy due to lack of visible and standardised property records. Billions of people have resources that cannot easily be transformed into productive capital. Blockchain is a powerful tool to solve these structural issues, which are some of the principal causes of poverty and conflict.”