Saylor's "Stretch" snaps as STRC slides to $71, dragging Bitcoin's favorite yield toy below par 🎢

Strategy's perpetual preferred stock STRC fell to a record intraday low of $71.25 on Friday after U.S. markets opened, trading roughly 29% below its engineered $100 par value before firming to $75.30, a nearly 0.5% decline on the day, according to Yahoo Finance. The slide extends a slide that took STRC to about $82.53 last week and comes as $BTC trades near $60,130, down roughly 5% over the past week and recovering slightly from a 21-month low of $58,188 reached on Thursday, per CoinGecko. Strategy's common stock MSTR slipped as low as $82.33 before ticking up about 0.5% to $85.80 on Friday and is down more than 84% from its November 2024 all-time high.

The rout has revived comparisons on social media between STRC and Terra's UST, the algorithmic stablecoin whose 2022 collapse erased about $40 billion. Benchmark-StoneX analyst Mark Palmer pushed back on the framing, writing in a Monday note that "STRC is not a stablecoin" and that "Strategy's objective has been to support STRC's trading at a level near $100, not to guarantee it." Palmer described the move as "a market-driven reset of required yield" rather than a depeg, noting that "something that was never pegged cannot be depegged." Unlike UST, which held its dollar value through a mint-and-burn loop with sister token LUNA, STRC is a variable-rate perpetual preferred backed indirectly by Strategy's 847,363 BTC, worth about $54.5 billion according to the company's Monday disclosure.

The yield profile has done little to dispel the unease. STRC carries an 11.5% annualized dividend that the board has left unchanged for four consecutive months, leaving the effective yield near 15% with shares around $73. Investors are watching June 30 closely for both the ex-dividend and record date, when eligible holders will receive a semi-monthly payment of $0.48 per share on July 15, and for the next monthly dividend reset, with consensus expecting a bump to at least 12% or 12.50%. The deeper concern, however, is structural: the 90-day correlation between STRC and $BTC has climbed to nearly 0.70, the highest since the instrument's July 2025 debut, according to TradingView, eroding the product's appeal as a steadier income vehicle.

Strategy still has roughly 10 months of dollar reserves to cover STRC's dividend obligations at current prices, according to CoinDesk, and CryptoQuant noted the company held $2.25 billion in January to manage dividends and debt, though its cash cushion has thinned since. Two Prime CEO Alexander Blume told CoinDesk that "Michael Saylor's repeated pivots and deviations from his stated plans have shattered investor trust," framing the issue as one of credibility rather than solvency. Saylor addressed the pressure on X, writing that "volatility tests every capital structure," and pointed to "disciplined capital allocation, credit quality, and long-term value creation." Over $1.44 billion in positions were liquidated across crypto markets in the past 24 hours, dominated by $1.2 billion in longs, with $BTC accounting for $658 million, according to CoinGlass, as a $10.6 billion options expiry on Deribit looms.