Bitcoin Policy Institute Says It Found MSCI's Paper Trail for Excluding Bitcoin Treasury Firms
The Bitcoin Policy Institute says it found the receipts behind MSCI's push to remove Bitcoin treasury companies from its stock indexes. In a paper published September 30 called Wall Street's Invisible Committee, the Washington based think tank says embedded file metadata on MSCI's own consultation documents points to a predetermined outcome.
THE FILE PATH THAT CAUGHT BPI'S ATTENTION
MSCI has proposed a new rule that would screen out companies based on whether they hold mostly operating assets, a test the firm has framed as a neutral classification standard. The Bitcoin Policy Institute says the source file behind that public proposal carries an internal path reading Projects, DATCOs, Operating versus Non Operating. DATCO is industry shorthand for digital asset treasury company. The institute argues that a general classification rule should not still be carrying the internal name of the specific group it was built to exclude.
WHAT'S ACTUALLY AT STAKE
Roughly 21 trillion dollars in assets are benchmarked to MSCI's indexes. A change to who qualifies forces the funds tracking those indexes to buy or sell shares to match. MSCI's own simulation of the new rule would remove Strategy, Metaplanet, and the uranium holding company Yellow Cake, and prior estimates put potential forced selling of Strategy shares at 2.8 billion dollars from MSCI linked funds alone, climbing to 8.8 billion dollars if other index providers followed. A decision is expected by October 16.
A SECOND ATTEMPT AT THE SAME RULE
This is not MSCI's first run at this idea. The firm proposed excluding companies with at least half their assets in digital holdings in 2025, then shelved that plan after pushback from Strategy, Strive Asset Management, and investor Bill Miller, among others. The version under review now uses broader, asset neutral language about operating companies, but the Bitcoin Policy Institute's paper argues the target has stayed the same.
A LONGER RECORD ON CRYPTO
The paper also traces MSCI's public stance on crypto back to a 2021 article it published called Creeping Crypto, which described most cryptocurrencies as speculative instruments with little evident utility and flagged Bitcoin mining's energy use as an environmental concern. It also points to MSCI chairman and chief executive Henry Fernandez's long public record of ESG advocacy, including his described ambition for MSCI's flagship global index to go green one company at a time, as part of the case that the line between MSCI's climate advocacy and its index rulemaking has not been clean.
WHAT MSCI'S METADATA DOES AND DOESN'T PROVE
The Bitcoin Policy Institute is careful to note that metadata alone cannot prove the rule's outcome was decided in advance. What it does show, in the institute's framing, is that the people writing a supposedly neutral test for every company in the index had one specific category of company in mind the whole time. MSCI's decision, due within the next two and a half weeks, will determine whether Strategy and Metaplanet stay inside one of the world's largest index systems or get pushed out of it.
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