MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin Gambit: Genius Accounting or Reckless Speculation?

Michael Saylor’s MSTR keeps doubling down on BTC—but are those ’earnings’ just paper gains dressed up as corporate strategy?

Accounting alchemy: How a software company turned volatile crypto swings into an earnings narrative. Spoiler: Wall Street still eats it up.

The real playbook? Leverage Bitcoin’s volatility to mask operational stagnation—because nothing impresses institutional investors like a good old-fashioned hype cycle.

Bonus jab: Meanwhile, traditional finance still can’t decide if crypto is a scam or their next revenue stream. Classic hedge.

MSTR created a movement

Strategy (big "S") has not only created a movement, but a category. Levered MSTR ETFs (including this new one which pays "income") serve the market for whom MSTR’s 70 vol is dull. Grayscale announced an ETF that tracks 30 companies that hold at least 100 bitcoin.

Last, but not least, Cantor Equity Partners, a SPAC, is merging to form Twenty One Capital, which will hold $3 billion of bitcoin. Mention this trend in a room full of pundits and they’ll yell "Gamestop!" in unison. It’s fun.

This is all fine. Adding bitcoin to the treasury of non-crypto companies* is an interesting trend. (And that doesn’t include crypto-native companies, like CoinDesk’s parent company, Bullish.)

But it’s only bitcoin at the moment.

US (bitcoin) exceptionalism

Despite the loosening of U.S. regulatory zip-ties on digital assets and the recent flurry of ETF filings, bitcoin still dominates the conversation (it still accounts for about two-thirds of the total cryptocurrency market).

Again, that’s fine if we are talking about a store-of-value asset contributing to a corporate treasury otherwise allocated to cash and treasuries. However, the growing number of flavors of bitcoin exposure--leverage, yield, optionality, protection--are taking the place of education about what other blockchain assets hope to deliver, and why it is important to spend more time thinking about the asset class.

Until recently, that was fruitless for many investors and advisors, since brokerage- or futures- account implementation was not available. (Of course, it has been for ETH, but you need more than ETH to think about the "digital asset class." Lack of enthusiasm for ETH investment vehicles, we believe, has struggled in part for this reason.)

If 2024 was bitcoin’s "coming out" year, we hope that 2025 gives investors and traders opportunities to think deeper and more broadly, and to implement accordingly. If not, the U.S. crypto investing narrative will start to sound like a "bitcoin maxi," and that feels like leaving money on the table.