Strategy Challenges MSCI’s Digital Asset Exclusion Plan, Warns Billions Could Exit Crypto Indexes

10/12/2025 admin

Key Takeaways:

Strategy formally opposed MSCI’s plan to exclude Digital Asset Treasury companies (DATs) from global equity indexes.
The company argues DATs are operating businesses using Bitcoin as strategic capital, not passive asset funds.
Strategy warns the proposed 50% digital-asset threshold could damage U.S. crypto innovation and mislead global investors.

Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) has issued a detailed response to MSCI after the index provider launched a consultation on whether companies holding more than 50% of assets in digital tokens should be excluded from its Global Investable Market Indexes. MSCI’s suggested rule would directly affect Strategy, widely viewed as the world’s first large-scale corporate Bitcoin treasury.

The letter highlights strong disagreement and pushes MSCI to withdraw the proposal, which Strategy says could reshape institutional exposure to crypto-backed companies and undermine the United States’ emerging leadership in digital infrastructure.

MSCI Proposal Sparks Resistance from Bitcoin’s Largest Corporate Holder

MSCI is assessing eligibility regulations after the emergence of companies holding digital assets as operating capital and treasury reserves. According to the firm, concentrated holdings have special index risks.

Strategy replied that the way of MSCI is discriminative and it is not consistent with the traditional classifications. The company claims that digital assets are being segregated off of similar corporate balance sheets that have the high levels of concentration of reserves such as energy commodities, real estate, gold or timber.

Strategy emphasizes that MSCI would be establishing a whole new precedent that does not focus on asset concentration, but only on digital-asset exposure.

Strategy says that the 50% threshold of MSCI mischaracterizes the way Bitcoin reserve companies work, and describes them as passive investing vehicles, which the company highly disavows.

DATs Are Not Investment Funds, Strategy Insists

Bitcoin Treasuries Operate More Like Technology Companies Than ETPs

In its original submission, Strategy outlined multiple business dimensions intended to demonstrate that a treasury-heavy corporate structure can still function as a conventional operating business.

Strategy emphasized that it:

Builds bitcoin-secured credit products,
Uses Bitcoin actively rather than passively,
Retains flexibility to allocate capital,
Continues to develop enterprise software and analytics services,
And distributes exposure through equity and fixed-income instruments not fund units.

From Strategy’s perspective, MSCI’s ruling would effectively label any firm with majority digital asset holdings as an investment fund, regardless of business model or operating history.

Strategy argues this is fundamentally incorrect and could cause severe index distortions affecting valuation methodologies, indexing flows, corporate classifications, and passive asset allocation models used globally by pension funds and ETFs.

Why the 50% Rule Could Disrupt Capital Markets

Strategy criticizes the threshold as arbitrary for several reasons:

Digital asset valuation changes rapidly, meaning a company could move in and out of eligibility during price volatility
Accounting standards differ globally and would complicate consistent classification
Indexing methodology could unintentionally become tied to market swings rather than fundamentals

Under these conditions, Strategy believes MSCI could be forced into constant recalculation while companies oscillate across the threshold purely because of token price movements, not operational business shifts.

Strategy warns that this inconsistency would introduce volatility directly into index construction itself, something the firm believes contradicts MSCI’s role as a “neutral and standardized” market reference.

Risk to U.S. Digital Asset Leadership and Innovation

Strategy mentions that the omission to include DATs would undermine U.S. positioning in a time when the government is actively interested in the development of digital assets. The company claims that the modern environment of the United States is shifting toward institutional-scale digital-asset supports, with references to Treasury direction, the development of SEC policy, and bipartisan legislative momentum all through the course of 2024-2025.

The company believes that the offer of MSCI contradicts the efforts of the U.S. to maintain leadership in global digital finance, token infrastructure, and blockchain-based capital formation.

The response of strategy is that global indexing standards must not be prejudiced in making structural conclusions before the underlying technology has been mature enough.

Institutional Capital Exposure at Stake

Besides policy issues Strategy points out the short-term practical effect, billions of passive capital invested in MSCI indices would be forced to move out of firms such as Strategy.

The automatic allocation of capital to constituents is done by equity funds that track indexes derived by MSCI. Without it, the company would not have access to those flows of passivity and this would undermine access to institutional liquidity.

Strategy also highlights that its investors buy functional intelligence and management strategy, and not just exposure to Bitcoin. Taking DATs off world indexes would mislead actual investor intentions.

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