Accounting firms are restricting corporations from holding the cryptocurrency as assets even as they give free rein to venture capital firms — such as SoftBank Group Corp. — to invest in equally risky and volatile unicorns. MicroStrategy Inc. and Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. own Bitcoin but they are exceptions. One survey found that only 5 per cent of finance executives plan to invest in Bitcoin this year.
That mindset is getting in the way of the broader adoption of Bitcoin and other cryptos because companies holding such digital currencies bear an accounting risk: big asset write-downs.
This is happening even though there are no official guidelines under the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) over how companies should account for digital assets. Accountants are operating out of a consensus among auditors — in their “non-authoritative” voice as they try to define the new era in a new report — that cryptos are not considered cash, or financial instruments, but “indefinite-lived intangible assets” because they “lack physical substance.”

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