A third-party model circulated in November 2022 with a counterfactual question: what would MicroStrategy’s crypto holdings have been worth if each of its Bitcoin purchases had instead been used to buy Ether? The result was a hypothetical comparison, not revenue earned or reported by MicroStrategy.
The starting data were real. In its quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, MicroStrategy said it held about 130,000 BTC as of October 31, 2022. Those coins had cost an aggregate $3.983 billion, including fees and expenses, at an average purchase price of about $30,639.
The Ethereum comparison replaced every historical Bitcoin purchase with Ether bought at the price available on the same date. A widely shared summary of the model estimated that the company would have held roughly 3.54 million ETH and that the simulated portfolio would have been worth about $1.47 billion more at the model’s measurement time. Those figures depended entirely on historical prices, timing assumptions and the selected valuation timestamp; MicroStrategy did not make the calculation or propose changing its treasury strategy.
Why the estimate was not company revenue
A counterfactual mark-to-market gain is not operating revenue, cash flow or a realized return. It also does not show that Ether was the better choice before the purchases were made. The exercise uses hindsight and omits practical questions such as market impact, execution costs, custody, tax, liquidity and the risk of concentrating a corporate treasury in either asset.
The model also added a possible staking return. That layer required further assumptions about when Ether could have been staked, the portion actually deployed, validator or service-provider costs, downtime and changing yields. It therefore should not be presented as income the company could have received with certainty.
Ethereum had completed its transition to proof of stake on September 15, 2022. The network’s documentation says The Merge reduced estimated energy consumption by about 99.95%. That technical change helps explain the contemporary interest in Ethereum, but it does not validate the model’s portfolio outcome or predict either asset’s future price.
