Welcome to the US Crypto News Morning Briefing — your essential rundown of the most important developments in crypto for the day ahead.
Grab a coffee, settle in, and think beyond the daily price swings of Bitcoin. What if the story isn’t about timing the market, but about how a company’s structure quietly compounds value over the years? That’s the argument Strive CIO Jeff Walton is making about MicroStrategy (MSTR), a stock that, on the surface, moves with crypto, but underneath, he says, operates like a machine steadily increasing Bitcoin exposure per share.
Crypto News of the Day: Strive CIO Jeff Walton on Why Buying MSTR at 2.5x mNAV Still Beats Spot Bitcoin
Jeff Walton, Chief Risk Officer at Strive and founder and CEO of its subsidiary True North, says most investors fundamentally misunderstand MicroStrategy (MSTR).
Reflecting on his own 2021 purchases, Walton argues the stock should not be viewed as a leveraged Bitcoin proxy. Rather, investors should view MSTR as a capital markets engine designed to increase Bitcoin exposure per share over time.
Walton revealed he began buying MSTR in June 2021 at roughly 2.5x mNAV, believing the stock was already down 50%.
“Little did I know, the stock would fall another 80% from my cost basis,” he wrote, as MSTR collapsed nearly 90% from its February 2021 peak.
By late 2022, the company was trading near 1.3x mNAV, holding 129,999 Bitcoin while its notional debt briefly exceeded asset value. Despite being “down bad on paper,” Walton said the underlying math never broke.
“The company had REAL hard money, debt covenants weren’t egregious, and structurally everything on the horizon for crypto was bullish,” he said, citing the halving cycle, ETFs, elections, and interest rate shifts.
By mid-2023, Walton said he went “all in,” convinced the capital structure, not price action, was the real thesis.
That conviction, he argues, is what allowed long-term holders to survive one of the harshest drawdowns in crypto equity history.
How Time and Structure Changed the Risk Equation for MicroStrategy
Fast forward to late 2025, Walton notes that MicroStrategy now holds 672,497 Bitcoin. Notably, this is more than 12 times the size of the next-largest publicly traded corporate holder.
More importantly, he says, the risk profile of his original shares has undergone a fundamental change.
“The 1x NAV per share price is 160% greater than the 2.5x mNAV shares I purchased back in June of 2021,” Walton wrote, adding that the rising NAV floor now sits above his original cost basis.
In his view, capital market activity steadily de-risked common equity while amplifying Bitcoin exposure per share.
