Business intelligence company MicroStrategy, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, has been added to a key global equity index following a surge in its stock price.
On Tuesday, MSCI (originally Morgan Stanley Capital International), a global provider of investment decision support tools, including equity indexes, announced MicroStrategy as one of the three largest additions by market capitalization to its MSCI World Index, effective May 31.
Following its most recent bitcoin acquisition on April 29, MicroStrategy now holds 214,400 BTC -0.11% , currently valued at approximately $13.5 billion. MicroStrategy’s total acquisitions were made at a cost of $7.5 billion, or an average of $35,180 per bitcoin, meaning the firm has a paper profit of around $6 billion from its bitcoin purchases.
MicroStrategy’s stock price has surged since bottoming alongside the cryptocurrency market in December 2022. Its shares have gained more than eightfold since that time and are up over 87% year-to-date, outperforming bitcoin’s 45% gains in 2024, according to TradingView.
MSTR/USD price chart. Image: TradingView.
In March, investment firm Kerrisdale Capital, who holds a short position on MicroStrategy’s shares, said the stock was trading at an “unjustifiable premium” to bitcoin.
MicroStrategy used as a bitcoin proxy
Given its substantial bitcoin holdings — equivalent to more than 1% of bitcoin’s total supply of 21 million — MicroStrategy has increasingly been used as a proxy to bitcoin exposure in the traditional market, especially before the launch of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the U.S. in January.
MicroStrategy’s addition to the MSCI World Index is also indicative of how bitcoin exposure can creep into traditional portfolios, given that billions of dollars track or are benchmarked against the index, Bloomberg noted. However, the new spot bitcoin ETFs are now accelerating that trend.
Earlier this month, MicroStrategy announced plans to launch a bitcoin-based decentralized identity solution.