Strategy founder Michael Saylor has published a long essay, "The Path to Prosperity in the Digital Economy," arguing that AI-driven gains in productivity should be matched by changes in financial policy. Speaking at the Bitcoin Policy Institute’s Freedom Tech DC summit in a discussion with Conner Brown, Saylor said individuals and businesses should have the right to create, issue, custody, transfer and use digital assets as a way to build wealth and prosperity.
His core claim is that the digital asset era and the age of digital intelligence need a digital bill of rights, not a restrictive statute. In his view, AI will allow people and companies to produce far more than they do now, and a more productive economy will need better money and better capital markets to unlock that output.
Five rights for digital assets
Saylor says a workable framework should establish five basic rights for both individuals and businesses: the right to create new digital assets, financial instruments and applications; the right to issue those assets into the market and use them to finance companies and productive activity; the right to custody assets directly or choose the custodian that offers the best service; the right to transfer assets among people, businesses, wallets and service providers; and the right to use assets for spending, investing, earning income and borrowing against collateral.
Those rights, he argues, need to rest on financial privacy and practical market access. The value of an asset depends on what its owner is allowed to do with it. If policy limits usability, it also limits economic potential. He also separates digital tokens, digital currencies, digital capital and digital securities by function, while saying policy should preserve a common foundation of ownership and freedom. Clear disclosure, enforceable ownership rights and accountability for fraud are, in his telling, the basics of a functioning market.
Financing 10 million new businesses
Saylor ties digital asset policy directly to entrepreneurship. AI, he writes, will automate jobs, reshape industries and make existing products obsolete. Prosperity will depend on whether the economy can create new companies and new opportunities fast enough. Someone who can use AI to build a product, he says, should also be able to raise capital for the company that brings that product to market.
He presents digital tokens as a faster and lower-cost route for capital formation. Policymakers, in his view, should set clear and practical issuance rules, require disclosures that match the scale of an offering, and create simple paths for founders to reach potential investors directly. Small-business finance should not be reserved for those who can afford a large team of lawyers.
He sets an explicit target: 10 million new businesses should be able to raise capital. Without that, he argues, the productivity gains from digital intelligence will not turn into new jobs, new products and broadly shared prosperity.
Let digital dollars compete
Saylor says digital currency can put dollars in the hands of people around the world and move them at the speed of light. If the goal is a stronger dollar, he argues, then the best companies should be allowed to compete to make dollar products more useful. Banks, fintech firms and technology platforms should all have a clear path to offer digital dollars.
He also says issuers should be allowed to compete on yield. Customers should be able to choose among different yields, services and clearly disclosed risks. If policy suppresses yield competition to protect institutions that pay little or no interest, he says, that puts institutional interests ahead of customer interests. Where the law blocks that competition, he argues, the law should be changed.
Bitcoin in banking and insurance
Saylor describes Bitcoin as digital capital. Its utility rises, he says, when individuals and businesses can hold it safely, finance against it efficiently and connect it to the rest of the economy.
Under his preferred framework, banks would be able to custody Bitcoin under clear and commercially workable rules and extend credit against Bitcoin collateral. Insurance companies would also have a practical path to include digital capital in their balance sheets and product design. Competition, he says, should improve customer outcomes and lower costs.
He points to accounting, capital and regulatory rules as barriers. One example he cites is the 1250% risk weight applied under the Basel framework to Group 2b cryptoasset exposures. Saylor says policymakers should revisit that treatment and assess digital assets according to their actual risks and the specific activity involved.
He also draws a line between holding assets for customers, making collateral-based loans and holding an asset on a bank’s own balance sheet, saying regulation should treat those as distinct activities. As more institutions compete to serve Bitcoin holders, he expects more ways for them to use capital without selling the asset, while businesses gain financing and financial firms gain customers. He adds that bank adoption could become a major growth driver for the sector as more capital enters the limited-supply Bitcoin market.
Tokenization and owner choice
On tokenized securities, Saylor says tokenization can make equities and credit available around the clock and across markets. The bigger opportunity, in his view, is expanding what owners can do with those assets. Investors should be able to hold tokenized securities directly, move them to their preferred service provider and use them in competitive custody and lending markets. Businesses should have the same rights.
He gives a simple example: an investor with $1 million in stock holdings may find one provider offering better financing terms, another offering yield opportunities and a third offering better service. The investor should be able to compare those options and move assets accordingly. Even if a customer ultimately chooses a custodian, self-custody still matters because the ability to leave gives the customer bargaining power. If assets are portable, providers have to compete to keep clients.
Putting securities on a blockchain while keeping them trapped inside the same closed intermediary system, he argues, leaves much of the opportunity unrealized. Policy should expand owner choice.
Financial privacy and reporting thresholds
Saylor frames financial privacy as part of economic freedom. Individuals should be able to live normally and businesses should be able to operate without unnecessary disclosure of their financial affairs. That protects personal safety, business strategy and the freedom to choose counterparties.
His policy preference is that ordinary lawful transactions below a meaningful threshold, such as $10,000, should not trigger routine government reporting simply because money or digital assets moved. Reporting systems should serve a clear public purpose, and the burden should match the risk. He says privacy in everyday commerce can coexist with targeted reporting and investigations for suspicious activity.
He notes that current U.S. federal currency transaction reporting rules apply to cash transactions above $10,000, including aggregated transactions under the relevant rules, and that the threshold dates back to 1972. In a 2024 report, the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated that the inflation-adjusted equivalent for 2023 was about $72,880. If the threshold stays fixed for decades, he argues, more ordinary activity gets swept into a system designed for much larger transactions.
His proposal is to raise outdated reporting thresholds and index them to inflation. He also says the digital economy needs clear protection for routine transfers between individuals, between businesses and between a person’s or company’s own accounts or wallets.
Portable KYC and AML compliance
Saylor argues that compliance should be portable. In over-the-counter markets, the same investor may have to complete anti-money laundering and know-your-customer checks separately for each financial counterparty. Documents are collected again, identity is verified again, and approval can take days. Every new relationship adds cost before any productive activity begins.
He contrasts that with a different goal: billions of investors transacting with millions of service providers in seconds at near-zero cost. If every relationship requires a fresh manual review, he says, the result is the opposite — thousands of investors, dozens of providers, days of waiting and high costs.
His preferred model is to make it practical for a customer to complete identity verification once and, with permission, reuse trusted credentials across service providers, with appropriate updates. He notes that existing banking rules already allow reliance on another financial institution’s identity procedures in limited cases. He wants that practical reliance expanded, with clear responsibility and liability rules, plus interoperable credentials that disclose only the information needed for a transaction.
Service providers would still be responsible for risk assessment and suspicious activity monitoring. But routine verification, he says, should be reusable, while extra review should be tied to actual risk. Repeated collection of the same sensitive documents raises costs and creates more copies of information that must be protected.
Everyday payments need a de minimis tax exemption
Saylor says the right to use an asset has to work in ordinary life. Buying dinner or paying for a routine service should not turn a customer into a tax accountant. Under current U.S. tax rules, spending digital assets can require calculating and reporting capital gains or losses, and he says that administrative burden discourages everyday use.
He calls for a meaningful de minimis exemption for ordinary digital asset payments. In his view, a purchase cap of $20 or $200 is too low for modern commerce; a family dinner can exceed $200. The design matters, he adds. A threshold based on taxable gain is not the same as a limit based on purchase amount. The exemption should be large enough to cover ordinary consumption, indexed to inflation and simple enough that qualifying payments do not require line-by-line calculation and recordkeeping.
He also says tax exemptions and government reporting thresholds solve different problems, though both should respect people’s time and the economics of daily life. An asset that moves instantly but creates hours of paperwork has not fulfilled the promise of digital money.
Financial rails for AI agents
Saylor says the economy is moving toward a model in which software handles more of the work that people once did by phone, on websites and in face-to-face meetings. AI agents, he writes, will increasingly research, negotiate, purchase and coordinate with other agents.
That kind of economy needs financial infrastructure that runs continuously. Money and capital must be available at software speed, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Traditional finance was built around human identity, human interfaces and human working hours. As people and businesses delegate more activity to AI, they will need practical ways for agents to transact on their behalf. That means digital wallets, programmable payments, transferable assets and financial services that software can access directly.
Bitcoin and other digital assets are naturally suited to that environment, he argues, because an internet-based agent needs capital it can identify and use digitally. It cannot move a gold bar at light speed or wait months for a real estate transaction every time it needs to allocate resources. He expects a large wave of innovation to emerge where digital intelligence and digital assets meet.
Technology capability as a national priority
Saylor says AI will create opportunities and risks, and some actors will use powerful technology for harmful purposes. The answer, in his view, is to make sure responsible individuals, businesses and public institutions have the ability to defend themselves. If hostile actors use AI agents, effective defense may require stronger agents. A country that limits its own technological development, he argues, cannot assume its rivals will accept the same limits.
He compares that logic to air power, space power and cyber power, saying national security depends on the ability to develop and deploy advanced technology. The United States, he says, should put the best tools in the hands of individuals, businesses, schools and public institutions, allowing students to learn with AI and entrepreneurs to build with it.
SEC, CFTC, Treasury and the White House
For the next two years, Saylor says the most promising path toward greater digital asset freedom runs through the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the U.S. Treasury and the White House.
He says the SEC should make capital formation and tokenized securities more useful and accessible. The CFTC should support competitive digital commodity and derivatives markets. The Treasury and banking regulators should create workable paths for custody, lending, payments and the integration of digital capital into financial institutions. The White House, in his view, should coordinate a national direction that supports innovation and economic leadership.
Each agency should use its statutory authority to remove unnecessary barriers and create clear paths for new products, he says. Where legislation is needed, Congress should expand the rights of individuals and businesses.
Saylor also says he opposes the path taken by the CLARITY Act because it puts too much emphasis on restriction. The test for any proposal, he argues, is what people are actually allowed to create, own, transfer and use once it takes effect. A long and detailed law can still be a poor foundation for prosperity if it protects existing intermediaries by limiting the utility of new assets.
Products people rely on
He acknowledges one argument for broad legislation: it could shield the industry from future unfriendly governments. That is a reasonable goal, he says, but the cost is too high if the law removes most of the industry’s potential from the start.
There is another source of durable freedom, in his view: building useful products that people genuinely rely on. Washington will find it hard to protect products that do not exist and have no users. Once millions of people use a product to save, finance a business or improve their lives, its value becomes concrete, and those users have something specific worth defending.
Saylor says the industry should build strong products, bring them to market and earn that support, while policymakers should leave room for that process. As markets develop and practical problems become clearer, rules can be refined. He closes by saying digital assets could ultimately become a $100 trillion industry if millions of people and millions of companies are free to explore better ways to create and organize capital.