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FASB Confirms 'Fair Value' Approach for Corporate Crypto Holdings
The new rules by the U.S. accounting standards setter would go into effect in December 2024.
Updated Mar 8, 2024, 6:37 p.m. Published Dec 13, 2023, 4:25 p.m.
The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), a U.S. entity that details how companies should report assets on their balance sheet, published a standards update on Wednesday that will let corporations recognize "fair value" changes in crypto holdings.
The move will benefit companies with crypto on their balance sheets, like MicroStrategy (MSTR). Under the existing rulebook, companies have to report a loss if the crypto they hold is worth less than the purchase price, even if they haven't sold the assets. Under the new rules, companies will have to report the fair value, cost-basis and types of assets they're holding.
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Stakeholders providing feedback to FASB said the existing guidance did not provide useful information for investors or other parties, the update document said.
"Accounting for only the decreases, but not the increases, in the value of crypto assets in the financial statements until they are sold does not provide relevant information that reflects (1) the underlying economics of those assets and (2) an entity’s financial position," the document said.
The new rules were adopted unanimously by the board and will take effect after Dec. 15, 2024, the document said.
A section explaining how FASB got to the point of adopting new guidance said it received a vast amount of feedback supporting a new approach to digital assets.
"Stakeholders’ feedback, including respondents to the 2021 FASB Invitation to Comment (ITC), Agenda Consultation, indicated that improving the accounting for and disclosure of crypto assets should be a top priority for the Board," the document said. "Nearly 500 respondents to the 2021 ITC requested that the Board add to its agenda a project related to crypto assets."
FASB has been working on updating accounting rules for crypto holdings over the past several months, with FASB indicating in September it would adopt the new guidance.
Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy's founder and former CEO, previously tweeted that the move would make it easier for corporations to adopt bitcoin as a treasury asset, an argument he repeated Wednesday morning after the FASB guidance was released.
FASB has officially adopted Fair Value Accounting for #Bitcoin for fiscal years beginning after Dec 15, 2024. This upgrade to accounting standards will facilitate the adoption of $BTC as a treasury reserve asset by corporations worldwide. https://t.co/4GOuji6cr0
— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) December 13, 2023
Bitcoin's [BTC] price rose more than 1% after the guidance was released, trading around $42,150 as of press time.
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What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
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The Republican lawmaker who is among the core negotiators on the U.S. market structure bill said the White House has rejected some ethics language.
What to know:
- Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) said she is negotiating with the White House on behalf of Senate Democrats trying to insert ethics provisions into Congress' market structure legislation.
- Lawmakers should reveal a new draft market structure bill by the end of the week and hold a markup hearing next week, she said.
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