Nasdaq-listed Strive, the 14th-largest public Bitcoin treasury firm, has asked MSCI to withdraw or revise a proposal that would remove companies holding more than 50% of their assets in digital currencies from MSCI indexes. In a letter to MSCI chairman and CEO Henry Fernandez, Strive warned the cutoff would unintentionally shrink passive investors’ exposure to important growth industries and fail to target the firms MSCI intends to exclude.
Strive says the rule would hit treasury-focused businesses particularly hard. JPMorgan analysts have estimated that MicroStrategy — included in the MSCI World Index and led by chair Michael Saylor — could face a roughly $2.8 billion impact if the change is implemented. MicroStrategy has said it is engaging with MSCI on the issue.
Strive CEO Matt Cole argued that several major Bitcoin miners and related firms likely affected by the proposal, including Marathon Digital (MARA), Riot Platforms and Hut 8, are rapidly diversifying their operations. These companies are expanding data-center capacity and power infrastructure to serve AI computing workloads as well as Bitcoin mining. Cole noted that many analysts now view access to power and data-center capacity as a limiting factor for AI growth, putting diversified miners in a strategic position to capture rising demand. Because these firms will likely retain Bitcoin on their balance sheets even as AI and infrastructure revenue grows, excluding them would bar investors from participating in those growth opportunities.
The letter also highlights the rise of Bitcoin structured finance. Firms such as MicroStrategy and Metaplanet provide products and exposures that resemble structured notes tied to Bitcoin returns, some in partnership with large banks like JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Strive argues that such activity represents a core business line for some public companies; excluding them from benchmarks would be an asymmetric penalty that raises their cost of capital relative to traditional financial firms they compete against.
Strive criticized the proposed 50% threshold as impractical. Because digital-asset prices are highly volatile, a fixed cutoff would cause companies to move in and out of indexes — creating “flicker” that increases management costs and tracking error for index funds. Measuring exposure is also complex: companies obtain crypto exposure through many instruments, including derivatives and ETFs, making a simple balance-sheet test unreliable. Strive pointed to Trump Media & Technology Group as an example MSCI’s preliminary screen missed: spot Bitcoin holdings were just under 50%, while the company sought additional digital exposure through other means.
Instead of a blanket exclusion, Strive proposed that MSCI offer an “ex-digital asset treasury” variant of existing indexes. That would allow investors who wish to avoid heavy crypto treasuries to choose an ex-digital benchmark while preserving a standard index that reflects the full investable equity universe for others.