Bitcoin treasury Strategy has blasted Morgan Stanley Capital International’s proposal to exclude it from its Global Investable Market Indexes, calling it “misguided” and “flawed.”
Writing in a letter to MSCI Monday, the Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin behemoth’s founder, Michael Saylor, and CEO, Phong Le, said that the company was discriminating against digital asset businesses.
MSCI said earlier this month that it was consulting on a plan to define “non-operating companies” and make them ineligible for its Global Investable Market Indexes. The removal of such companies would exclude firms like Strategy from indexes visible to a large pool of institutional investors.
MSCI’s latest proposal comes after the company in 2025 proposed excluding from its indices all companies whose digital-asset holdings represent 50% or more of total assets.
“MSCI’s continued effort to discriminate against digital assets is misguided and calls into question MSCI’s neutrality and reliability,” Strategy’s letter read.
It added: “The proposal, like the 2025 proposal that MSCI withdrew, is discriminatory, arbitrary, and misguided. If adopted, the proposal would have no meaningful impact on Strategy’s business, but it would profoundly harm MSCI’s reputation as a reliable and neutral index provider. Like the 2025 proposal, the current proposal should be withdrawn.”
Strategy argued that MSCI was relying on unprecedented classifications to define Bitcoin as a “non-operating” asset. Strategy said it reports its Bitcoin business as an operating segment and its Bitcoin gains and losses as operating expenses.
The company said that MSCI’s methodology for targeting “non-operating companies” was “arbitrary and unexplained,” and was just a way of unfairly targeting digital asset treasuries.
Strategy further argued that the company is an operating one, employing 1,500 people across the globe and actively using its Bitcoin to “create shareholder value.”
Strategy — formerly MicroStrategy — is an enterprise software company that pivoted to buying and holding bitcoin in 2020. It first bought the cryptocurrency to protect shareholders but has since aggressively bought the asset and is now the largest corporate holder of the cryptocurrency, with 845,050 bitcoins worth $65.8 billion at today’s prices.
Investors can buy Strategy’s Nasdaq-listed stock (MSTR) to get heightened exposure to bitcoin’s performance.
MSTR closed Monday trading 4% higher. Year-to-date, the stock is down 15%.