Michael Saylor, executive chairman of the Bitcoin-focused treasury company Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), has argued that digital tokens should play a larger role in how businesses raise money as artificial intelligence changes how firms are created and organized.
In an essay, Saylor said AI will let individuals and companies produce far more goods, services, and software than before.
That surge in productive capacity, he wrote, will only translate into broadly shared prosperity if capital formation becomes faster, cheaper, and more widely available.
Saylor’s central claim is that the ability to invent a product with AI should be matched by the ability to finance the company that brings it to market.
Traditional fundraising, he contended, remains too costly, slow, and legally dense for most entrepreneurs.
Digital tokens, in his view, can compress those frictions by allowing issuers to reach investors more directly and at lower expense.
He set an ambitious target: policy should make it realistic for 10 million new companies to raise capital this way, rather than concentrating public-market access among a few thousand seasoned issuers.
That expansion, he argued, depends on clearer issuance rules.
Policymakers should define practical pathways for bringing tokens to market so that founders do not need large legal teams simply to raise modest amounts of capital.
At the same time, Saylor stressed that easier issuance cannot come at the expense of market integrity.
He called for proportionate disclosure requirements so that prospective investors can assess risk, together with enforceable ownership rights and accountability for fraud.
Rules, he wrote, should help honest participants transact with confidence while still leaving room for products and business models that do not yet exist.
The broader framing is a “bill of digital rights” rather than a bill of restrictions.
Saylor listed five rights he believes individuals and companies should have over digital assets: the right to create them, issue them to finance productive activity, custody them, transfer them, and use them.
Tokens, currencies, capital assets, and securities serve different economic functions, he said, and policy should recognize those differences without undermining a common foundation of ownership.
Saylor also tied the argument to technological change more broadly.
If AI automates jobs and makes older business models obsolete, protecting incumbent structures while making it hard to finance their successors would leave the economy poorly prepared.
In that setting, digital tokens are presented not as a speculative novelty but as infrastructure for capital formation in an era when software can design products, companies, and even financing instruments themselves.
The essay is a policy proposal, not draft legislation. Its practical test, Saylor suggested, is whether a person who can build with AI can also raise the money needed to scale that work without being priced out of the capital markets.