Dubai Weekly
MSCI spent months weighing whether to treat bitcoin-heavy companies like investment funds instead of operating businesses. On Monday it blinked, and Strategy's stock jumped 7% within hours. MSCI told the market on October 16 that digital asset treasury companies will keep their current index treatment "for the time being." These are firms whose crypto holdings make up half or more of their total assets.
That single phrase ended, for now, a review that had put billions of dollars in passive fund flows at risk. It had also turned Michael Saylor's Strategy into the test case for how Wall Street's index providers will treat the entire bitcoin-treasury trade. Shares of Strategy, the company formerly known as MicroStrategy, surged as much as 7% in after-hours trading once the news hit, according to a report from Bitcoin Magazine.
The relief was immediate because the stakes were real. Strategy has told investors that MSCI-linked funds hold roughly 13 million MSTR shares: about 3.1% of its basic shares outstanding and close to 60% of its stated 30-day average trading volume. JPMorgan had estimated that exclusion could force passive funds to sell $2.8 billion worth of the stock.
Total outflows could reach as high as $8.8 billion if other index providers like FTSE Russell and S&P Dow Jones followed MSCI's lead. This wasn't MSCI's first swing at the problem. The index provider first proposed excluding digital asset treasury companies back in 2025.
It shelved that plan in January 2026 after pushback from Strategy and others, promising instead to study the broader question of how it treats "non-operating companies." Then it came back on August 3 with a wider, more technical proposal: a two-stage test that first asks whether operating assets make up more than half of a company's balance sheet, then runs failing companies through five additional financial ratios covering things like cash flow from actual business activity and dependence on outside financing rather than asset price swings. Feedback on that proposal closed September 30, and MSCI had committed to a decision by October 16. Saylor didn't wait quietly for the verdict.
In a formal letter to MSCI's Equity Index Committee, he called the proposed eligibility test "discriminatory, arbitrary, and misguided," arguing that Strategy deploys bitcoin as productive capital rather than holding it as a passive bet on price. Strategy held 848,000 bitcoin as of October 4, according to the company's own disclosures. That's by far the largest corporate bitcoin position in the world, and the thing that makes it MSCI's biggest test case by a wide margin.
Frankly, nobody should mistake this for a clean win. MSCI did not increase index weightings to reflect new share issuance by these treasury companies going forward. That's a real constraint on Strategy's ability to grow its footprint in the index even as it keeps issuing equity to buy more bitcoin.
And MSCI said plainly that its indexes are built to track operating companies, not investment vehicles, and that a broader consultation on non-operating firms generally is still coming. The exclusion threat didn't disappear. It got deferred.
Metaplanet, the Tokyo-listed company that has built a Strategy-style bitcoin treasury strategy of its own, was named alongside Strategy as a target of the August proposal and gets the same reprieve for now. That matters beyond the two companies themselves. MSCI's eventual answer on non-operating companies will become the template every other index provider and ratings desk uses to judge the dozens of smaller firms that have copied the bitcoin-treasury playbook since 2024.
A think tank focused on bitcoin policy had already questioned how MSCI arrived at its list of affected companies in the first place: a sign that the fight over methodology is far from settled even with Monday's pause. Exclusion, if MSCI ever does pull the trigger, would not force Strategy to sell a single bitcoin. The company's treasury sits outside the index mechanics entirely.
What exclusion would hit is the stock price, through the mechanical selling that passive funds have to do when a holding drops out of the benchmark they track. That distinction is worth sitting with: the bitcoin position is safe either way. It's the equity, and the index-fund demand that comes with being inside MSCI's benchmarks, that was actually on the table.
Also read: Trump's former crypto chief Bo Hines faces scrutiny over Tether payments • Hot September CPI Print Sends Stocks and Crypto Tumbling Together • Samsung Wallet Makes USDC the Default Stablecoin for 82 Million Phones This article is posted in Crypto News , check it out for more related stories.
Source: Startup Fortune
