ChainThink report, on November 23, Tom Lee, Chairman and CEO of BitMine, stated that MicroStrategy has become the preferred tool for risk management among crypto investors, which in part explains the 43% drop in its stock price over the past month.

"Strategy is perhaps the most important indicator to watch right now, as it is both a Bitcoin proxy and the most liquid alternative asset," Lee said during an interview with CNBC on Thursday. Due to limited tools for hedging losses in the crypto market, institutional traders turned to shorting Strategy stock. The company holds nearly 650,000 Bitcoins, making its stock price closely tied to Bitcoin's performance.

"In my view, when crypto market participants try to hedge losses from their Bitcoin and Ethereum positions, they find no other hedging options besides shorting their most liquid alternative stocks - and MicroStrategy is the best choice," Lee explained. He added that native hedging tools such as Bitcoin and Ethereum derivatives lack sufficient liquidity for large funds, "any investor holding a large Bitcoin long position has very limited hedging capacity in the crypto derivatives market."

However, Strategy offers a workaround. "Investors can use the highly liquid Strategy options chain to hedge all crypto asset risks," Lee noted. "Essentially, Strategy is absorbing all the hedging pressure generated by the entire crypto industry to protect long positions."

Lee also mentioned the ongoing impact of the market crash on October 10, which erased $20 billion in market value and destroyed exchange liquidity. "This completely devastated market makers," he said, referring to market makers as the "central banks" of the crypto market. Since then, systemic cracks have persisted, with low liquidity in altcoins, mining stocks, and Bitcoin proxy assets like Strategy.

In the current downturn, MSTR has been one of the hardest-hit assets. Lee believes this is partly due to its role as the "pressure valve" of the market. He pointed out that the underlying structure of the crypto market remains fragile, and the phenomenon of Strategy becoming a hedging tool reveals deeper structural issues.