DATCO
INVESTINGDEFINITION
Digital Asset Treasury Company — an index-provider label for a public company whose balance sheet holds more than half its assets in crypto, used to decide whether it counts as an operating business or gets treated like a fund.
MSCI coined the term in an October 2025 consultation proposing to exclude companies meeting the 50%-of-assets threshold from its Global Investable Market Indexes, naming Strategy among roughly 39 candidates worldwide. The classification matters because index membership drives passive fund flows: a company labeled a DATCO risks being treated as a closed-end fund rather than a stock, which can trigger mechanical selling by every index tracker that holds it.
Strategy argued its way out of the label in December 2025, and MSCI shelved the proposal in January 2026. A broader August 2026 consultation reaches the same handful of companies — Strategy, Metaplanet, and Yellow Cake — through a "non-operating company" screen with no explicit crypto threshold, showing the label's substance can outlive its original definition.
IN A SENTENCE
"DATCO isn't an accounting term — it's the label an index provider reaches for when it wants to treat a bitcoin balance sheet as a fund instead of a business."
Key facts
Common questions
Is DATCO an official accounting or legal classification?
No. It's an index-provider term MSCI uses for its own screening methodology, not a designation from the SEC, an accounting standards board, or any regulator.
Does being labeled a DATCO automatically mean exclusion from an index?
No — it means a company is flagged for review under a specific proposal. MSCI's first DATCO-targeted proposal was shelved after Strategy's formal rebuttal in December 2025.