Strategy Maps Bitcoin as Reserve Asset in New Institutional Guide
Strategy, an institutional investment company, has released a new guide that reimagines Bitcoin's role in the financial system. The 21-page report describes Bitcoin as the foundation of a digital capital market, around which equity, credit, debt, derivatives, and money can be engineered.
The framework divides the emerging system into six layers: Digital Capital, Digital Equity, Digital Credit, Digital Debt, Digital Derivatives, and Digital Money. Bitcoin sits at the bottom as the reserve asset, while financial instruments with different risk and return profiles are built above it.
Strategy's own balance sheet increasingly resembles this architecture. As of September 7th, the company held 845,050 BTC, purchased for about $63.73 billion at an average cost of $75,412 per coin. It has been repurchasing preferred stock and doubling its digital-credit securities buyback authorization to $2 billion.
The new guide provides a conceptual explanation for this shift: Bitcoin can remain the reserve asset while the company actively manages securities, credit, and liquidity around it. This framework acknowledges the trade-off between potential returns and risk. Bitcoin's one-year return as of September 4th was -28.3%, but its 10-year annualized return remained at 62.8%.
Strategy explicitly notes that BTC has no contractual cash flow, no traditional valuation anchor, and can suffer severe drawdowns. The company also acknowledges a conflict of interest: it owns a material amount of BTC and issues securities whose value may be affected by Bitcoin's performance.