Has MSTR become the "Hedging artifact" for encryption players? What is the story behind it?

Recently, there has been an interesting phenomenon: institutions are hedging risks in the crypto market, surprisingly not by directly using derivation, but by shorting MSTR stock.

According to analyst Tom Lee, the logic behind this is that MSTR holds nearly 650,000 BTC, and its stock price is highly correlated with Bitcoin's performance. More importantly, MSTR's liquidity far exceeds that of various crypto derivation products, and the options chain is extremely active. So when institutions want to hedge the long risks of BTC and ETH, they simply short MSTR, this “Bitcoin proxy”.

The data confirms this: MSTR's stock price has fallen by 43% in the last month. Tom Lee bluntly stated that this is not a fundamental issue, but rather the market is using MSTR's high liquidity to “absorb hedging pressure”.

But the problem reflected behind this is deeper: the liquidity and depth of the derivation market in the crypto market itself are still insufficient. After the market crash in mid-October, the liquidity of exchanges was damaged, and market makers were weakened, prompting institutions to prefer using MSTR as a “standard stock” to hedge risks.

In other words, MSTR has become a “firewall” for risk management in the crypto market — but it also exposes the problem that the encryption financial infrastructure is still not perfect.