 
 
Vanguard, known in crypto circles for calling Bitcoin an “immature asset class” that is unsuitable for long-term investors, has emerged as the biggest institutional shareholder of Strategy (MSTR), a company whose business model is built around aggressively accumulating and HODLing the world’s largest and oldest cryptocurrency.
Vanguard Becomes Strategy Whale
According to Bloomberg, Vanguard now owns roughly 20 million shares of Strategy, or roughly 8% of the outstanding common stock. This stake is worth around $9.26 billion. The $10 trillion asset manager has effectively outpaced Capital Group to become the top institutional holder of MSTR shares.
“Institutional dementia,” said VanEck’s head of digital asset research, Matthew Sigel. “Indexing into $9 billion of what you openly mock isn’t strategy,” he opined in a post on Twitter (aka X).
Michael Saylor’s Strategy (formerly known as MicroStrategy) has become a proxy for Bitcoin exposure in recent years. Since late 2020, the software intelligence turned Bitcoin treasury firm has now amassed approximately 601,550 BTC, valued at about $72 billion. Notably, Strategy’s share price has surged in tandem with the BTC price, encouraging other public companies to add the OG crypto to their corporate treasuries.
“The fact that Vanguard is now the largest shareholder of $MSTR is proof that God has a sense of humor,” Bloomberg’s senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said in a statement, explaining that Vanguard has built its business around index funds, which sometimes forces it to hold stocks linked to assets it may not particularly like.
 
Nonetheless, Vanguard is still avowedly anti-Bitcoin. It was not so much the company’s decision not to debut its own Bitcoin ETF that caused so much hate from the crypto community, but instead the firm’s refusal to offer its clientele access to spot BTC funds, even as top rivals such as BlackRock introduced the incredibly successful iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), which recently became the fastest ETF in history to cross the $80 billion AUM milestone.
Even the appointment of Bitcoin-friendly ex-BlackRock exec Salim Ramji as CEO in May last year hasn’t changed Vanguard’s position. “I think it’s important for firms to have consistency in terms of what they stand for and the products and services they offer,” Ramji clarified at the time.
Source: https://zycrypto.com/oh-the-irony-vanguard-is-now-the-largest-institutional-shareholder-of-bitcoin-focused-strategy-despite-calling-btc-immature/