Bitcoin has been left in the dust by Ripple's XRP over the last week, with traders betting a Wall Street earthquake could be about to hit the cryptocurrency.
The bitcoin price rally, which began earlier this year but took off after the election of Donald Trump, has stalled at just under $100,000—though some are predicting the market will explode in 2025.
Now, as analysts spot a "tipping point" that could send the bitcoin price to $200,000, bitcoin juggernaut MicroStrategy is poised to be added to the Nasdaq-100 Index, potentially sending huge swathes of investor cash into the company's already sky-high stock.
MicroStrategy joining the $26 trillion Nasdaq 100, "will open up flows to a new class of investors that would not otherwise have singularly bought a stock like MicroStrategy on their own," Jeff Park, head of alpha strategies at Bitwise, told Coindesk.
If the company, which sells business analytics software alongside holding huge amounts of bitcoin, is added to the Nasdaq 100 it would then be eligible to join the $312 billion Invesco QQQ exchange-traded fund (ETF), one of the world's largest ETFs that all but guarantees a passive, permanent flow of capital.
The Nasdaq stock exchange will announce its latest index membership shuffle on December 13, with MicroStrategy's $75 billion market capitalization putting it well within the top flight—it's the 66th-largest company by market cap following its near-500% stock price surge this year.
"MicroStrategy's inclusion is basically guaranteed," Stony Chambers Asset Research analysts wrote in a Seeking Alpha post, however others have warned MicroStrategy's pivot to bitcoin since 2020 could mean Nasdaq classifies it as a finance company, rendering it ineligible for inclusion in the index.
MicroStrategy, founded as a software company in pre-dot com bubble internet boom, has been transformed into what its cofounder and chairman Michael Saylor calls a "bitcoin treasury" company, outperforming the likes of stock market darling Nvidia as it funds its bitcoin buys with the sale of convertible notes and at-the-market share offerings.
MicroStrategy has ridden the bitcoin price boom to an all-time high valuation, far outpacing bitcoin itself as traders use the company's stock as a bitcoin proxy.
This week, MicroStrategy sold 3.7 million shares over the past week, using the funds to buy another $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin, its the fourth consecutive weekly purchase that's taken its bitcoin pile to just over 400,000 bitcoin worth $38 billion.
