Saylor breaks Bitcoin-selling celibacy vow, swears it was for the "digital credit" 🥩

Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy, publicly defended the company's first reported Bitcoin sale since 2022, arguing that the ability to offload $BTC is essential to its "digital credit" business. The disclosure, made in a June 1 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, showed Strategy selling 32 $BTC, a move seemingly at odds with Saylor's long-running "never sell your Bitcoin" mantra. Speaking to Cointelegraph at the $BTC Prague conference, Saylor said Bitcoin treasury companies must retain the option to sell holdings when needed to back dividend-paying securities and other credit products. "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," he said, adding, "The company is in the business of selling digital credit. The credit is backed by capital. Bitcoin is capital." Saylor described instruments like Strategy's STRC preferred stock as digital credit products that use the company's Bitcoin balance sheet to support its credit obligations, a structure that has become a primary capital-raising tool for further Bitcoin acquisitions.

Saylor framed digital credit markets as the next "trillion-dollar opportunity" in finance, predicting they could unlock yield-bearing digital money products at scale. "I see Bitcoin as the digital transformation of capital. I see STRC as the digital transformation of credit," he said, noting that digital credit products can offer yields of up to 8%, which is three to four times more than traditional savings accounts. He cited projects including Saturn and Apyx as examples of yield-bearing products built on top of digital credit markets, and said the sector could bring billions of dollars into the Bitcoin ecosystem.

One of those projects, Apyx Finance, recently faced a stress test. On June 4, its dividend-backed synthetic stablecoin apxUSD depegged to as low as $0.90 as Bitcoin traded below $63,000 and STRC shares fell below their $100 par value. According to Apyx, the decline in STRC, the stablecoin's primary collateral asset, reduced the protocol's reserve value, with falling Bitcoin prices, thinning liquidity and derivative-driven market dynamics cited as additional factors. At press time, apxUSD traded at $0.96, below its $1 peg, according to CoinGecko. The full interview with Saylor will be released on Cointelegraph's YouTube channel in the coming days.