Is Bitcoin being “hijacked” by MicroStrategy? A dangerous signal is becoming increasingly clear

Let me talk about a recent discovery. Whether it turns out well or not, you can judge for yourselves—I think it might not be good. Right now, BTC’s (big pie) price action is tracking MSTR, the US-listed stock.

Last night, the US stock market fell. The overall drop was 1.5%. Breaking it down on the 5m chart, it was basically a steady decline.

But we know BTC didn’t follow the sell-off. BTC’s chart looks like this: the market opens at 9:30, rises first to 30B, then falls, bottoms at the 30B support, and then trades sideways.

Now look at MSTR’s chart. As shown below, MSTR opened higher because it had risen during the pre-market in the daytime, then it fell to around 93 and traded sideways.

Because the US stock market kept dropping with no bottoming/sideways action, but both BTC and MSTR show the same pattern: after falling for a bit, they form a bottom and trade sideways.

Of course, you can’t say BTC and MicroStrategy’s moves are completely identical, but for most of the time they look very similar. So many people will ask: could MSTR be following BTC?

There’s actually one phenomenon that can’t be explained if MSTR is following BTC: why, on the weekend, BTC hardly moved at all. In a market that trades 24/7, there shouldn’t be any “weekend” effect. Because when the US stock market is closed, MicroStrategy doesn’t move either.

And three weeks ago, there was an instance where BTC had a relatively big move over the weekend—but if you look closely, that weekend was: it went up on Saturday, then on Sunday it returned to the original level.

Also, during daytime there’s pre-market trading for US stocks. You can compare that time window and see that BTC’s moves match MicroStrategy’s almost exactly.

My guess is that a lot of current quantitative trading robots, CTA strategies, and arbitrage models may use MSTR as a leading indicator for Bitcoin. Once MSTR rises, they automatically go long BTC; when MSTR weakens, they reduce risk exposure.

If more and more funds adopt similar logic, the market may form a kind of “self-reinforcement.”

A while back, Saylor said he wanted to repurchase MSTR shares, which pushed MSTR up for a wave, and BTC also rose for a wave—but there was no follow-through.

So now an asset with a market cap of $1.5 trillion is being anchored to a US stock with a market cap of only $30 billion. Isn’t that ridiculous?

After all, does MicroStrategy alone—holding only less than 5% of Bitcoin—have this much influence? It’s not holding 50%!

Now imagine this: if someone wanted to do something malicious, manipulating MicroStrategy’s stock price to manipulate BTC—wouldn’t that cause major problems here? Because manipulating BTC with a market cap of $1.5 trillion is hard, but manipulating the $30 billion US-listed MicroStrategy is much more feasible.

Manipulating a $30 billion company might be done with only tens of billions—but the effect could be to manipulate BTC with a market cap of tens of trillions. That increases the profit opportunity by at least 100x—basically adding 100x leverage, while the cost doesn’t increase.

So, from where I see it, MicroStrategy’s impact on BTC is still too big—it hides too many downsides. I can believe MicroStrategy’s starting point is good. But what about the day when someone finds a loophole? Or what if Saylor loses his conscience and directly gets into wrongdoing?

So in my view, the current “MicroStrategy” is, without question, one of the biggest roadblocks to BTC’s development. BTC’s biggest value is decentralization—no sovereign can interfere with it—but the logic has changed now.

If in the future the market relies more and more on the share price of a single listed company as the anchor, then this decentralization aspect will, to some extent, be weakened.

At the moment, the probability that MicroStrategy blows up in the short term doesn’t seem high. The company still has several billion dollars in cash, and its overall resilience is stronger than before.

But what’s truly worth worrying about isn’t whether MicroStrategy will have a problem today—it’s whether the entire market is forming a new kind of centralized dependency.

If one day that dependency becomes even stronger, then company management, market participants, and other external forces could all gain influence larger than in the past.

So, to me, what really needs attention isn’t MicroStrategy itself, but this: is Bitcoin gradually losing its most core advantage—decentralized price discovery?

Of course, this is just a phenomenon and thought I’ve observed recently, and it doesn’t mean a certain conclusion has already formed. You can also combine your own observations and discuss: Is Bitcoin really being influenced more and more by MSTR? If so, is this a short-term phenomenon, or the beginning of a structural change in the market?