TBW - Strategy Sold 32 Bitcoin and Bought 24,869 — and the Market Is Reading the Wrong Playbook
Strategy disclosed the sale of 32 BTC between May 26 and May 31 for $2.5 million, earmarked to fund the dividends on its preferred shares. Thirteen days earlier, it had bought 24,869 BTC for $2.01 billion. Two opposite moves — and a balance that leaves the company a massive net buyer.
"Buying and selling BTC at Strategy don't belong to the same strategy, but few people have grasped that," sums up Thierry Lobjois, Chief Commercial Officer at Paymium. The original strategy raises capital through equity in order to stockpile bitcoin (843,706 BTC, nearly $60 billion) and "isn't meant to sell."
The second, more recent one, rests on the STRC preferred shares — a product that pays an 11.5% coupon (up from 9% at launch) with no maturity. Servicing those dividends requires liquidity, and that is the one and only place where the sales come in.
For Alexandre Laizet, CEO of Capital B, a French listed company modeled on Strategy's approach, nothing here was forced. Everything had been telegraphed by chairman Michael Saylor during the last earning call. "It's the first time you can predict, down to the bitcoin, what the company is going to do," he explains: pay down debt, then sell off a little bitcoin to "inoculate the market."
He reads three goals into it: shoring up Strategy's bid for the S&P 500 by proving the treasury can be sold, supporting a ratings upgrade (a "B-" already secured from S&P), and lending credibility to digital credit. The real doctrinal shift, in his view: "Before, they paid the interest by issuing shares; now they're owning the fact that they can also pay it with their bitcoin." His takeaway: "32 bitcoin isn't a major event. But symbolically, it's a turning point."
Then there's the tax argument. In the United States, a company chooses which lots it sells. "So it picks the ones bought at $120,000 to book a capital loss," notes Lobjois — a technique already used in late 2022. Laizet, however, treats it as secondary: "We're talking about just 32 bitcoin. That's exactly what proves the tax angle isn't the main story."
And if bitcoin were to collapse? A drop, on its own, doesn't threaten the structure. "There's no liquidation risk: it's a perpetual product, with no maturity," Laizet stresses. He runs with the image of a mortgage borrower who's been out of work for a year: what counts isn't paying everything back in six months, but the ability to make the monthly payment. Strategy, he says, has "roughly a year of dividends in cash and forty years payable in bitcoin."
The pressure sits elsewhere — in the cost of financing. STRC's coupon climbed to 11.5%, less because of bitcoin than because of the competition (Strive launched SATA, paying 13%). On the common-stock side, if the mNAV (already close to 1.0x) slips below 1, any new issuance starts destroying value. No mechanism forces a sale of the treasury, but both of these push up the cost of capital whenever bitcoin weakens.
The Big Whale's analysis
The most striking thing isn't the sale itself, but the gap between what the market reads into it and what it actually covers. Many still view Strategy through the 2024 template — issue, buy, capture a premium — where unloading 32 BTC can only be a betrayal of "never sell." Yet the company has split in two: an accumulation machine and a digital-credit machine now coexist, each with its own logic. "The model is simple," says Laizet, "but for it to be simple, what's underneath is very sophisticated."
Two caveats that players invested in the ecosystem tend not to dwell on: everything still rests on a single, volatile asset, and the soundness being described assumes uninterrupted access to credit and at least a modest rise in bitcoin. For an institutional investor, 32 bitcoin says nothing about how solid Strategy is.
What will say something: demand for its credit securities against rivals like Strive, its cost of financing, and bitcoin's ability to remain credible collateral in the eyes of the rating agencies and the indices.
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