MSCI Technical Freeze of Bitcoin Treasury Company: Passive Fund Automatic Purchase Mechanism Fails

【BlockBeats】A significant change was announced on January 8th. The major provider of global stock and ETF indices, MSCI, announced a policy adjustment — they will temporarily not remove Bitcoin treasury concept stocks from the indices, but at the same time, they have implemented a so-called “technical freeze” on the stocks of such companies.

What exactly is MSCI doing? They will no longer increase the share count (NOS), foreign inclusion factor (FIF), or local inclusion factor (DIF) for these securities. In other words, the weight of these stocks in the index is locked. Additionally, MSCI has postponed the inclusion or rebalancing of all securities on the preliminary list.

This seemingly mild “freeze” actually touches the core mechanism of index operation. The phenomenon where passive funds automatically buy into newly added shares has been completely cut off — this eliminates the “forced sell-off risk,” which sounds good. But the problem is, the original “automatic upward pull effect” of index investing has also disappeared.

The realistic result: without MSCI passive funds’ automatic buying, these Bitcoin treasury companies will have to rely on active investors’ genuine capital to attract new funds. This directly threatens their previous business logic of “continuously increasing Bitcoin holdings through financing.” Without the mechanical support of index funds, future financing will be much more difficult to achieve.