A micro strategy that beats bitcoin
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Grab a coffee, calm down and think beyond Bitcoin's daily price fluctuations. What if the story isn't about timing the market, but how the company's structure has quietly been valued over the years? That's the argument Strive CIO Jeff Walton makes about MicroStrategy (MSRL), a stock that, on the surface, is powered by crypto, but underneath, operates like a machine, constantly adding bitcoin exposure to stocks.
Crypto News of the Day: Why MSTR Is Buying at 2.5x mNAV CIO Jeff Walton Focuses
According to Jeff Walton, chief risk officer at Strive and founder and CEO of subsidiary True North, most investors understand microstrategy (MSTR) in its basics.
Reflecting on his own 2021 purchases, Walton argues that the stock should not be viewed as a useful Bitcoin proxy. Instead, investors should view MSTR as a capital market engine designed to increase Bitcoin exposure per share over time.
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Walton He said he started buying MSTR at 2.5x mNAV in June 2021, believing the stock was already down 50%.
“Little did I know, the stock would drop another 80% based on my spending,” he wrote, as MSTR had fallen nearly 90% from its February 2021 peak.
In the year At the end of 2022, the company was trading at around 1.3x mNAV, holding 129,999 bitcoins, suggesting its debt briefly exceeded its asset value. Although it was “bad on paper,” Walton said the bottom line never broke.
“The company had real hard cash, the debt covenants weren't huge, and everything in the structure was crazy for crypto,” he said, citing the semi-cycle, ETFs, options and interest rate swaps.
In the year By mid-2023, Walton says he's “all in,” convinced that capital structure, not price action, is the real thesis.
That conviction, he argues, allowed long-term holders to survive one of the worst losses in crypto equity history.
How time and structure have changed the risk equation for microstrategy
By the end of 2025, Walton MicroStrategy will now hold 672,497 bitcoins. Notably, this is more than 12 times the owner of the next-largest publicly traded corporation.
More importantly, it says there has been a fundamental shift in the risk profile of its first stocks.
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“1x NAV per share is worth 160% of the 2,5x mNAV shares I bought back in June 2021,” Walton wrote, adding that the NAV floor is now set above the original cost base.
In his view, capital market activity threatens common equity while expanding bitcoin exposure per share.
From this point on, Walton argues that the 2021 shares could structurally outperform bitcoin even if the company earns zero additional BTC.
“There is materially more exposure to Bitcoin in each share I bought than when I bought them in 2021,” he said, emphasizing that the excess Bitcoin exposure is backed by dilution, preferred equity and long-term debt rather than price appreciation.
That framing has received support from market commentators, who say investors buy systems, not benefits.
“Bitcoin is a bearer asset. A micro-strategy is a process of using public market incentives to acquire bitcoin,” commented one analyst.
In Walton's view, flexibility itself becomes a resource, serving not as a threat to the thesis but as fuel to develop it effectively.
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But is it a structural edge or a cycle-dependent trade?
Strive CEO Matt Cole echoed Walton's sentiment, saying recently that MSTR has outperformed bitcoin and gold in five years. According to Cole, this could remain true even at $75,000 BTC or 1x mNAV.
However, not everyone agrees that the structural edge will go forward. Contrarian narratives argue that while the five-year outperformance in mid-2025 is a reality, MSTR has materially outperformed Bitcoin in the second half of the race. Additionally, it has traded near or below 1x mNAV in recent weeks.
Elsewhere, Bachart notes that MicroStrategy was the worst performing Nasdaq-100 stock in 2025, down 65 percent from its peak in a broader crypto winter.
Critics, such as Peter Schiff, have dismissed the strategy entirely, arguing that the strategy's average bitcoin cost implies modest annual returns.
Others warned that a continuous sub-1x mNAV conditions could theoretically trigger the sale of Bitcoin, a condition that CEO Phong Le admitted makes “mathematical” sense, although management emphasized that this is unlikely.
Still, signs of institutional favoritism persist. According to industry opinion, big US banks are now looking for partnerships with a strategy, Michael Saylor, bank adoption, not value, defines the Bitcoin narrative for 2026.
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Does the MSTR structure prove loop-proof? Walton says that time and capital structures do the right thing, not the time.
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