Why Is Strategy Selling Bitcoin? The STRC Answer

Bitcoin is trading near $78,000-$79,000 as of Tuesday morning UTC, up roughly 20-22% over the past week after bouncing off a low-$60Ks slump in late July. Strategy — the company formerly known as MicroStrategy, and by far the largest corporate bitcoin holder — hasn't bought a single coin in that entire rally. In fact it hasn't bought any bitcoin since the week of June 15-21, its longest pause since at least 2024, and across several weeks since then it has sold roughly 5,000 to 7,000-plus BTC. So why is Strategy selling bitcoin right into a recovery, after building its entire identity around never selling? The honest answer is that this was never really about bitcoin. It's about defending a piece of preferred stock called STRC.

STRC is a perpetual preferred share Strategy issued to raise cash, paying a fat 12% dividend and carrying a $100 par value. Since spring it has traded persistently below that par — recently around $96-97 — which is a problem for a company whose whole model depends on investors trusting its paper. To fund the STRC dividend, buy the preferred back toward par, and build a cushion against a future downturn, Strategy needed cash. Rather than raise it by selling more stock into a battered market, it chose to sell some bitcoin instead.

That choice only makes sense once you understand what broke in June and July. Strategy's playbook for years was to issue new shares above the value of its bitcoin holdings, then use the proceeds to buy more bitcoin — a flywheel that only works if the stock trades at a premium to its underlying coins, a ratio known as mNAV. When BTC slid into the low-$60Ks, that premium evaporated: MSTR's mNAV fell to around 0.99x, and by some diluted measures briefly toward 0.71-0.72x. Selling new shares at that point would have diluted existing holders to buy bitcoin at a loss on paper. The flywheel stalled, so Michael Saylor formalized a BTC Monetization Program instead: sell up to $5 billion of bitcoin, redirect the cash to STRC's dividend and buyback, and grow a USD reserve that now stands at $5.1 billion plus a fresh $1.59 billion liquidity pool.

The scale of the selling argues for "yes, but cautious" rather than any change of heart. Even the higher estimate of 7,000 BTC sold is under 1% of the roughly 840,000 BTC Strategy still holds — a rounding error against the treasury, even though it landed as a symbolic gut-punch to a company that had marketed "we never sell" as core to its brand. The purpose of the sales is narrow and disclosed weekly in 8-K filings: fund STRC obligations and build cash, not liquidate the bitcoin position. Strategy is still, by a wide margin, betting its balance sheet on bitcoin rising over time. What changed is that it's now also managing a second liability — a preferred-stock structure with a fixed dividend it must pay whether or not bitcoin cooperates — and for a few months that liability took priority over adding to the pile.

Here's the twist that makes this story timely rather than settled: the very rally driving today's headlines has already undercut the reason the sales started. As BTC climbed back toward $79,000 this week, MSTR's mNAV recovered to roughly 1.05-1.06x, and the stock surged as much as 14% in a single session on the way to a roughly 21% weekly gain, outpacing bitcoin's own move. The premium that funds the buy-more-bitcoin flywheel is back. STRC still trades a few points under its $100 par, but the gap that forced Strategy into seller mode is closing fast. Bernstein's analysts and Strategy's own CEO, Phong Le, have both said bitcoin accumulation should resume later in 2026 if the recovery holds — meaning the company selling bitcoin today could plausibly be buying again within a quarter or two.

The base case is that sales continue in small, disclosed weekly tranches only as long as STRC needs support, and that Strategy resumes net buying once mNAV and the preferred price stabilize above their recent lows. That case breaks if bitcoin rolls back toward the $60Ks rather than holding this week's gains — mNAV would likely slip under 1x again, and Strategy would be stuck selling bitcoin at worse prices than it's getting now just to keep funding a 12% dividend it can't skip. That outcome would deepen, rather than resolve, the argument that Strategy's "never sell" identity is broken for good. The clearest signals to watch from here are the Monday 8-K filings disclosing that week's buys or sales, whether STRC keeps closing the gap to its $100 par, and whether Phong Le's "later this year" timeline for resumed buying actually holds up as the year runs out.

Strategy selling bitcoin during a rally looks contradictory only if you assume the company's only priority is bitcoin's price. It isn't — it also has a preferred-stock structure to defend, and for a few months defending it meant trimming the treasury instead of growing it. The sales are small relative to the holdings, fully disclosed, and tied to a specific, bounded goal. The more useful question than "has Strategy lost faith" is whether this week's rally holds long enough to make the sales unnecessary — and on the numbers so far, it's already most of the way there.