Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy, called for a “bill of digital rights” in an essay posted on X on Saturday, arguing that an economy remade by artificial intelligence needs open rules for digital assets rather than new restrictions. Saylor, whose company holds more bitcoin than any other corporation, wrote that the coming age of machine intelligence will raise output but only pay off if money and capital markets adapt to digital assets.
The essay sets out five freedoms. People and companies should be able to create new digital assets, issue them to markets to finance businesses, hold them or choose a custodian, transfer them between wallets and service providers, and use them to spend, invest, earn income, and borrow. Saylor framed the list as a baseline for legislation rather than a wish list, writing that the same rights should apply to individuals and corporations alike.
“An asset’s value depends on what its owner can do with it. Restrict its usefulness, and you restrict its economic potential,” Saylor wrote.
The argument leans on a demographic and economic claim. As digital intelligence automates work and makes whole product categories obsolete, Saylor wrote, prosperity will depend on how fast people can found new companies to replace the old ones. His benchmark is specific: the rules should aim to “enable 10 million new companies to raise capital.” In his reading, tokenization is the mechanism that lets small businesses reach global pools of money without gatekeepers.
Why the five rights matter to issuers
Each of the five freedoms maps to a concrete legal fight. The right to create and issue assets covers token launches that the SEC has historically treated as unregistered securities offerings. The right to hold and choose a custodian touches the qualified custody rules that have kept some banks out of the bitcoin business. The right to transfer is contested wherever exchanges have frozen withdrawals. The right to use, borrow, and earn is the one that most directly challenges the Howey test, because yield programs were the centerpiece of past enforcement actions against lending platforms.
Saylor’s framing avoids those case names entirely. That is part of the pitch. By stating the rights as principles rather than demands for specific carve-outs, the essay gives lawmakers language they can adopt without appearing to side with any single defendant or platform.
Timing amid a regulatory patchwork
The essay lands in a week of piecemeal US regulatory movement. SEC staff published guidance on Friday saying that staking receipt tokens for commodities like ether are not securities if they work purely as receipts, three years after the Kraken staking settlement. Staff also clarified when token buyback programs fall outside securities law, a change Uniswap founder Hayden Adams welcomed after years of avoiding buybacks for fear of enforcement.
The CFTC, for its part, issued interpretive guidance on blockchain recordkeeping and tokenized assets after the CLARITY Act failed to advance in Congress, leaving spot market jurisdiction split between agencies. None of these actions carries the weight of statute, and each can be reversed by a future commission. Industry lawyers have already warned that parts of the SEC’s buyback FAQ could be read so broadly that any startup could tokenize a revenue stream and avoid securities rules, a reading SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce disputes but which a16z general counsel Miles Jennings called “maybe the biggest loophole ever.”
Saylor’s push for statutory rights is, in effect, a response to that instability. Guidance shifts with each administration. A rights-based statute would not.
Strategy keeps buying
Saylor’s company put fresh money behind the thesis this week. Cointelegraph reported on Monday that Strategy resumed purchases after a two-week pause, buying 950 bitcoin for $75.7 million at an average price of $79,670 per coin. That lifted total holdings to 846,000 BTC, acquired for about $63.8 billion at an average cost of $75,416 per coin.
Bitcoin traded near $84,500 when the essay went up, recovering from an August drawdown and riding a wave of ETF inflows that turned 2026 net flows positive after a $2.4 billion weekly haul. The company’s average entry sits roughly 11 percent below the current price, so the position is back in profit after a stretch where it was not. Strategy’s equity has followed the same arc, and the company has funded much of its buying through convertible and preferred offerings that depend on that equity premium holding up.
The counterargument
Critics see the rights framing as advocacy dressed as principle. The five freedoms map neatly onto what token issuers want: easy issuance, free transfer, and the ability to market yield without registering offers. Consumer groups have argued for years that the ability to borrow against a token is what makes unregistered offerings dangerous when the token collapses, since retail holders are left with debt against an asset that no longer trades. Past platform failures, from Celsius to BlockFi, started with exactly the freedoms Saylor wants codified.
There is also a political read. The essay arrives when legislative momentum has stalled, which cuts both ways. A rights-based bill has a clearer moral frame than a jurisdictional one, but the CLARITY Act had bipartisan support and still failed, mostly over turf disputes between the SEC and CFTC. Adding a new conceptual layer may not break that logjam.
What the essay does signal is a shift in tone from the largest corporate holder. Rather than lobbying for a specific bill, Saylor is pitching a principle that could attach to whatever legislation eventually moves. The five rights are broad enough to survive drafting changes and short enough to repeat. Whether that is enough to restart a stalled process is the open question, but the timing, right after a week of agency guidance filling in for absent law, makes the point for him: the industry is now operating on rules that any future commission could rewrite.