- Strategy sold 1,690 bitcoin (roughly $213m by CryptoSlate’s count) and put $108.6m of it into buying back its STRC preferred shares. The selling has since stopped.
- STRC is designed to trade near $100. It sank to about $74 in late June and has clawed back to roughly $95.
- Holdings are unchanged at 840,447 BTC, about 4% of bitcoin’s 21 million supply cap and worth around $66bn. The funding has moved to equity: $2bn raised selling MSTR shares, no new bitcoin bought, and a separately labelled ‘USD Cash’ pool of roughly $1.59bn alongside the $4.8bn reserve.
Strategy has spent five years telling anyone who’d listen that it doesn’t sell bitcoin. Last week it sold 1,690 coins. The interesting part isn’t the sale. It’s what the proceeds were spent on, and what that reveals about the machinery underneath the company.
The largest corporate holder of bitcoin on the planet has now found a reason to sell some of it. The reason matters far more than the amount: the money went on propping up the price of a financial product the company itself issued.
That’s a different thing from losing faith in bitcoin, and it shouldn’t be read as one. But it does mean the coins are no longer only a long-term bet held for their own sake. They’re also a reserve that gets tapped when something else on the balance sheet needs holding up. The selling has since stopped, with share issuance doing the work instead, which suggests the coins are the second choice rather than the first. Second choice is still on the list.
What actually moved
The sale was 1,690 bitcoin. CryptoSlate values it at about $213m, which works out at roughly $126,000 a coin. Of that, $108.6m went straight into repurchasing STRC shares. The rest appears to have gone into the cash pile, which Cointelegraph puts at $4.65bn and CoinDesk at $4.75bn, a gap that reflects different snapshot dates rather than a dispute about the figures. Decrypt now has the reserve at $4.8bn, and it has kept growing since without any further bitcoin leaving.
What’s left in bitcoin is 840,447 coins, the same number as before the reserve was last topped up. The 1,690 sold represents about two-tenths of one percent of that. In balance-sheet terms it barely registers. The Block puts the remaining pile at roughly 4% of the 21 million bitcoin that will ever exist, worth somewhere around $66bn.
What STRC is, and why $100 matters
STRC is a preferred share. That needs unpacking, because it behaves almost nothing like the ordinary company shares most people picture.
An ordinary share is a slice of a business: you own a fraction of the company and your fortunes rise and fall with it. A preferred share is closer to a loan that trades like a share. You hand over a fixed amount, typically $100, and in return you receive a regular dividend. You don’t get the upside if the business booms. What you’re buying is the income.
Because the income is the point, the share is meant to sit near the $100 it was issued at. Strategy adjusts the dividend rate month to month specifically to keep it there: pay more, and buyers push the price back up. It isn’t a peg in any legal sense. Nobody has promised to redeem your share at $100. It’s a target the company maintains by managing the rate and, when that isn’t enough, by going into the market and buying the shares itself.
That’s exactly what happened here. STRC fell to around $74 in late June, a 26% discount to the number it’s supposed to trade at, which for an income product is a serious wobble. It’s back to about $95 after a run of open-market purchases. CryptoSlate’s estimate is that closing the last $5 would take something in the region of $785m more.
Why sell coins when you can sell shares?
This is the question the raw headline doesn’t answer. Strategy raised $653m issuing its own ordinary shares over the same period. It had the option of funding the buyback that way and leaving the bitcoin untouched.
Issuing shares dilutes existing holders, and the company’s ordinary stock has its own problems to worry about. Selling bitcoin doesn’t dilute anyone. It converts an asset the company already owns into dollars, and dollars are increasingly what this business needs. CoinDesk’s read is blunt and it sounds right: traditional investors have made clear they don’t treat a mountain of bitcoin as a substitute for cash. Hence the multi-billion-dollar reserve that didn’t exist a year ago.
That calculation has since flipped back the other way. After three weeks of coin sales, Strategy stopped, and the next round of STRC dividends, further buybacks and additions to the dollar reserve were covered by $334m raised selling MSTR stock. Bitcoin holdings didn’t move. So both taps feed the same machine, and the company appears to use whichever one is cheaper at the time: dilution when the equity market will take it, coins when it won’t.
The equity tap has since been opened a great deal wider. Strategy has raised $2bn selling MSTR common shares, bought no new bitcoin with the proceeds, and set aside roughly $1.59bn of it in a separately labelled ‘USD Cash’ pool. The disclosure doesn’t make clear whether that pool sits inside the $4.8bn reserve or on top of it, so the two figures are best treated as overlapping until a filing says otherwise. The direction is clear enough either way: the dividends and the buybacks are being paid for by shareholders accepting dilution rather than by coins leaving the treasury.
There’s a second reason the STRC price is worth money to Strategy. The preferred shares are how it raises capital now. A product trading at a quarter below par is a product that’s expensive to issue more of. Spending $108.6m to restore confidence in the instrument you plan to keep selling isn’t sentiment. It’s cost of funding.
The instrument is also acquiring a life of its own. Solstice Finance has launched the first STRC product on Solana, splitting the income from the preferred shares into a lower-risk senior and a higher-risk junior one. That’s a small thing today. It’s also a sign that other people are now building on the assumption that STRC holds near $100.
What you can and can’t read into this
You cannot read a price signal into 1,690 coins. It’s a rounding error against 840,447, and against daily market volume it’s nothing at all. Anyone telling you Strategy has started dumping is reaching well past the evidence, and the three-week run of sales has now ended.
What’s fair to say is that the treasury changed shape. A holding that only ever grew is now one that can be drawn down when another part of the structure needs support, even if that only happened for three weeks before shares took over again. It has also stopped growing for the moment: a $2bn raise that buys no bitcoin at all is a notable pause for a company whose defining habit was adding more every few weeks. That’s a different instrument from the one investors were originally sold, and it fits a broader pattern we’ve been tracking: the corporate bitcoin holders quietly getting smaller while the public story stays the same.
What to watch
Whether STRC actually reaches $100, and what it costs to get there. If the gap keeps closing on its own, the June scare was a scare. If it takes another few hundred million of buybacks, the support is structural rather than temporary.
The funding question now has a clearer answer. The coins stayed put once the equity market would pay the bill, and a $2bn share sale says that route is wide open at the moment. So the thing to watch is what happens the first time it isn’t. Selling MSTR stock only works while the price is tolerable and buyers are there. If that closes and the dividends and buybacks still fall due, the new ‘USD Cash’ pool goes first, the wider reserve after it, and the coins are what’s left behind that. Worth watching too whether the pool turns out to be genuinely ring-fenced or simply a label on money the company was already holding.