Bitcoin Policy Institute questions MSCI index rules excluding Bitcoin treasury companies.

BlockBeats news, October 1st — The Bitcoin Policy Institute published a report titled "Wall Street's Invisible Committee," investigating MSCI's plan to exclude certain digital asset treasury companies (DATCOs) from major stock indices. The report states that MSCI had previously proposed excluding treasury companies whose digital asset holdings account for at least 50% of total assets, but subsequently paused the effort due to market opposition. This year, MSCI reintroduced broader classification criteria targeting "non-operating companies," and its simulation results indicate that companies such as Strategy and Metaplanet could be affected.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute said it discovered in the embedded metadata of MSCI's public consultation documents that the source file path contains terms such as "Projects/DATCOs/Operating vs Non Operating." The institute believes this raises questions about whether the relevant rules were designed specifically for digital asset companies, while acknowledging that the metadata itself cannot prove that the outcome was predetermined.

The report also notes that as early as 2021, in its article "Creeping Crypto," MSCI had already focused on the issue of crypto assets entering stock portfolios and discussed topics such as Bitcoin energy consumption and corporate crypto asset exposure. MSCI currently manages indices covering approximately $21 trillion in funds. The Bitcoin Policy Institute said that changes to index eligibility could lead funds tracking the relevant indices to make large-scale position adjustments, and therefore the process of formulating index rules needs transparency and reproducibility.