Strategy’s Biggest Bitcoin Sale Yet Exposes Its Dividend Bill

Strategy sold 3,588 Bitcoin for roughly $216 million between June 29 and July 5, the largest Bitcoin sale in the company’s six years of buying. That trade dwarfs the 32 coins it sold in May and disclosed on June 1, the sale Michael Saylor spent weeks defending on stage as the price of running a Bitcoin-backed “digital credit” business.

The bigger the sales get, the harder the math behind Saylor’s dividend-paying preferred stock gets tested. And the investors carrying most of that risk are not the Bitcoin faithful who cheer his keynotes. They are retail buyers who thought they had bought something closer to a savings account.

The Sale That Dwarfed Everything Saylor Sold Before

Strategy, the Nasdaq-listed company formerly known as MicroStrategy, disclosed the trade in a Monday filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), split into two pieces. It sold 1,363 Bitcoin (BTC) between June 29 and June 30 at an average price of $59,256, then 2,225 more between July 1 and July 5 at an average of $60,773.

Michael Saylor, Strategy’s executive chairman, confirmed the numbers himself. In a post on X, he wrote that the company had sold 3,588 Bitcoin to fund dividends on our Digital Credit securities, while noting the firm still holds 843,775 BTC and $2.55 billion in dollar reserves.

That stack, acquired at an average cost of $75,476 per coin, still makes Strategy the largest corporate Bitcoin holder on the planet, more than four percent of every coin that will ever exist. The company’s funding model built around aggressive Bitcoin buying spent the year raising billions to keep the accumulation going even as the price fell.

A sale that once ran in the tens of thousands of dollars now runs in the hundreds of millions, and the jump happened inside five weeks. The board had already opened that door on June 29, authorizing sales of up to $1.25 billion in Bitcoin, room for roughly 20,800 more coins if cash needs escalate.

MSTR shares, down more than 30% this year, slid toward $100 the morning the sale was disclosed before steadying. The same quarter brought an $8.32 billion loss on digital assets, mostly paper losses tied to Bitcoin trading below the company’s cost basis.

Inside Strategy’s Dividend Machine

Strategy funds its buying partly through a family of preferred shares it groups under the Digital Credit label: STRC, STRF, STRK, STRD and STRE, all tied economically to the Bitcoin treasury rather than the company’s software revenue. Four trade on Nasdaq alongside the common stock; a fifth trades in Luxembourg.

STRC, nicknamed Stretch, is the biggest and most closely watched. It priced at $100 par when it raised $2.521 billion through an initial public offering (IPO), at the time the largest US IPO of 2025 to that point and the largest US exchange-listed perpetual preferred stock offering since 2009. Its dividend started at 9% in August 2025, climbed to 11.5% by March 2026, and was raised again to 12% by early July as Strategy tried to hold the shares nearer par.

That dividend has to be paid in cash every month, whether or not Bitcoin cooperates. Strategy has said it raised $5.6 billion in STRC proceeds so far this year, funding that flowed straight back into more Bitcoin purchases.

Late in June, the board approved what Strategy calls its Digital Credit Capital Framework, five linked policies meant to formalize when and how Bitcoin gets sold:

• A USD reserve policy requiring a dollar cushion covering at least 12 months of dividend and interest payments, boosted from $1.4 billion to $2.55 billion within a week.
• A revised STRC dividend policy that adjusts the monthly rate to try to hold the shares near their $100 par value.
• A digital credit securities repurchase program of up to $1 billion, letting Strategy buy back its own preferred shares when they trade cheap.
• An MSTR common stock repurchase program, a lever the company has not needed to pull yet.
• A BTC Monetization Program, the mechanism that turned Bitcoin sales from an unspoken taboo into a scheduled tool.

Saylor has taken the pitch on the road. At Goldman Sachs’s Digital Assets Conference in London in late June, he told bankers that digital credit built on Bitcoin now tops $11 billion, up from a standing start roughly a year earlier.

Saylor’s Case for a Bitcoin That Can Be Sold

For years, Saylor’s answer to any question about selling was blunt. Asked once whether the company would ever sell after Bitcoin had fallen roughly 40% from its highs, he said: “We’re not sellers. We’re only acquiring and holding bitcoin. That’s our strategy.” That line, repeated across earnings calls and keynotes, became a pillar of the case for owning MSTR stock instead of Bitcoin itself.

Speaking with Cointelegraph at the BTC Prague conference, Saylor reframed the argument around what a credit business actually requires.

If the company’s policy is that we won’t sell the Bitcoin, then the credit won’t have value and the equity won’t have value. The company is in the business of selling digital credit. The credit is backed by capital. Bitcoin is capital.

Saylor told Cointelegraph at the conference. Not everyone in his camp needed convincing. Anthony Scaramucci, the SkyBridge Capital founder who has defended Saylor’s strategy on CNBC, has argued that a later Bitcoin rally matters more than any single disclosed sale. Strategy’s own president, Phong Le, described the same move more clinically, calling it the company “evolving from one-way capital issuance to active capital management.”

Retail Holders Carry the Riskiest Slice

JPMorgan’s read on the same facts is less generous. Managing director Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou warned that Strategy’s new sales policy creates risk that cuts both ways for crypto markets, days after the framework became official.

The concern centers on who actually owns STRC. An estimated 83% of the preferred stock sits with retail investors, roughly $8.8 billion in capital, buying what Strategy marketed as steady income close to a savings-account substitute. STRC carries, in the company’s own SEC disclosures, only a preferred claim on residual assets, with no direct lien on the Bitcoin itself.

The shares sank well below their $100 par value through late June, at one point trading near $75, a 25% discount by JPMorgan’s math, and dipping as low as $71.25 before climbing back to just under $88 by early July.

Not every analyst reads the stress the same way. Mizuho cut its price target on the stock to $213 from $265 in early July while keeping an Outperform rating, after updating its model for the smaller Bitcoin stack. Crypto analyst Ali Martinez called the timing of the sale, arriving just as a technical indicator flashed a sell signal for Bitcoin, “not exactly what bulls want to see.”

One Stablecoin Already Showed the Fault Line

The clearest evidence of what can go wrong sits outside Strategy’s own stock. Apyx Finance issues apxUSD, a synthetic stablecoin collateralized primarily by STRC shares rather than by Bitcoin or dollars directly.

On June 4, apxUSD depegged, trading as low as $0.90, while Bitcoin traded below $63,000 and STRC sat under its $100 par value. Apyx said the decline in STRC, its primary collateral asset, cut the protocol’s reserve value, and pointed to falling Bitcoin prices and thinning liquidity as compounding factors.

The token had recovered to around $0.96 by the time Cointelegraph reported on it, still short of its $1 peg. The episode traces a short, direct chain: Bitcoin prices STRC, STRC collateralizes apxUSD, and the stablecoin’s peg depends on both holding steady at the same time.

Strategy is not navigating this alone. Bitcoin has fallen more than 43% from its October high near $126,199, part of a broader pullback that saw billions exit crypto spot ETFs as institutional money rotated toward artificial intelligence stocks.

Could Strategy Be Forced to Sell Even More Bitcoin?

Strategy’s own math says it has room, at least for a while. The company published an interactive credit model on July 9 estimating its Bitcoin reserves and cash cushion could cover preferred dividends and bond interest for years without Bitcoin rising in price again, though the tool comes from Strategy itself, not an independent rater.

Saylor released the calculator two days after confirming the $216 million sale, aimed at what he described as renewed Wall Street questions about how long the company can operate through a prolonged Bitcoin downturn.

• $22.178 billion in combined obligations across Strategy’s convertible bonds ($6.714 billion) and preferred stock ($15.464 billion), per the company’s own July 9 model.
• 2.7x asset coverage, what Strategy calls its BTC Rating, measuring Bitcoin reserves against those obligations.
• 3.33% the annual Bitcoin price growth the company says it needs, on average, to keep servicing every coupon and dividend without raising new capital.
• 30 years the payment runway Strategy claims its $52.87 billion in Bitcoin and $2.55 billion cash cushion could cover, even with zero further Bitcoin appreciation.

U.Today, which first detailed the tool’s metrics, suggested it also challenges agencies such as S&P, which rates Strategy’s debt as junk, by publishing math anyone can check rather than relying on outside graders.

None of that changes the mechanics already in motion. Strategy still owes cash dividends twice a month on STRC and quarterly payments on its other preferred series, while Bitcoin, near $60,000 as the latest sale closed, sits well below the $75,476 average price the company paid for its stack. Every payment due while Bitcoin stays there comes out of the dollar reserve, out of new capital raised at a discount, or out of the Bitcoin itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Strategy’s digital credit business?

Digital credit is Saylor’s shorthand for preferred stock and related instruments that convert Bitcoin holdings into cash-paying securities for investors who want yield without holding Bitcoin directly. Across the industry, Bitcoin-backed preferred shares have grown into a roughly $13 billion market, according to a June 2026 report from BitcoinTreasuries.net and Apyx, which projects the category could reach as much as $130 billion over the long term.

What are STRF, STRK, STRD and STRE?

They are the other four series in Strategy’s preferred stock lineup alongside STRC, each carrying its own dividend rate and priority claim on the company’s assets. Combined with STRC, that same report put the four series near $12.5 billion in market value, compared with about $330 million for Strive’s rival instrument, SATA.

How much Bitcoin does Strategy hold after the sale?

Strategy holds 843,775 BTC after the latest sale, acquired at an average price of $75,476 per coin. Ziven.io, a bitcoin treasury data platform, has estimated that stack is worth around 179% of Strategy’s entire stock market value, meaning the market currently prices the whole company below the Bitcoin sitting on its balance sheet.

Did Saylor really promise Strategy would never sell Bitcoin?

Yes, repeatedly. Asked in past years whether the company would ever sell after a steep Bitcoin drawdown, Saylor said, “We’re not sellers. We’re only acquiring and holding bitcoin. That’s our strategy.” He has since argued the pledge applied to individual investors rather than corporate treasury policy, a distinction critics say does not match his own earlier comments.

What happened to the apxUSD stablecoin?

Apyx Finance’s apxUSD, which had about $476 million in circulating supply at the time according to DefiLlama data, depegged to $0.90 on June 4 as its STRC collateral lost value alongside falling Bitcoin prices. It had recovered to roughly $0.96, still below its $1 target, as of the most recent reporting.

Is Strategy still buying Bitcoin?

Yes. The company says it remains committed to Bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset and has continued making smaller purchases through the year’s downturn. Strategy’s own framework states the monetization program does not obligate it to sell any Bitcoin going forward.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Bitcoin, preferred stock and related crypto-linked instruments carry significant risk, including loss of principal. Consult a licensed financial professional before making investment decisions. Figures are accurate as of publication on July 10, 2026.