Strategy Dumps 1,638 BTC to Pay the STRC Bills, Now Sitting on $4B of Dry Powder 🧾

Strategy, the Bitcoin treasury firm led by Michael Saylor, sold 1,638 BTC between July 27 and August 2 at an average price of $63,957 for $104.7 million, according to a Monday 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The disposal reduced the company's holdings to 842,138 BTC, acquired at an aggregate cost of $63.51 billion, or $75,419 per coin. The sale is Strategy's second since breaking from its long-held "never sell" stance at the end of May, when it disposed of 32 BTC for $2.5 million at an average of $77,135 to fund preferred distributions — its first Bitcoin sale since December 2022, when it offloaded 704 BTC as a tax-loss harvesting exercise before buying back 810 BTC two days later.

Of this week's proceeds, $52.4 million funded dividend payments on Strategy's STRC preferred stock and $52.3 million went toward repurchasing STRC shares, with total STRC buybacks reaching $81.2 million, or 912,143 shares. The remaining $28.9 million of the repurchase was funded out of common stock sales. The buyback is Strategy's second under a $1 billion program announced June 29, leaving $893.8 million of authorization outstanding. Strategy will hold the STRC dividend rate at 12% annually, declaring semi-monthly payments of $0.50 a share, and said the moves tightened STRC's Bitcoin credit spread by five basis points.

Strategy also sold $290 million in MSTR shares during the same period, with $250 million of the proceeds going to increase the company's USD Reserve to $4 billion, $28.9 million funding additional STRC repurchases and $11.7 million added to its cash balance. The firm sold 3,011,361 MSTR shares for $290.6 million net. Strategy founder and chairman Michael Saylor said on X that the week's activity extended the company's "USD duration" by 57 days to 2.3 years.

The capital activity follows a framework Strategy unveiled in its June 29 8-K filing, which sets out when the company would sell Bitcoin and allows for up to $1.25 billion of disposals. Strategy sold $216 million worth of BTC in July and has now used $321 million of that capacity, discounting the 32 BTC sale that preceded the framework's establishment. The firm has not added Bitcoin since June 22, when it purchased 520 BTC, building its USD reserve against $1.76 billion in annual dividend obligations largely by selling MSTR shares. Strategy's holdings are now 5,225 BTC below the 847,363 peak reached in June, a reduction of 0.6%.

STRC traded at $89.4, or 10.6% below its $100 intended par value, during Monday's pre-market session, while MSTR declined 0.9% in pre-market trading, per Yahoo Finance data. Bitcoin traded at around $62,600 on Monday, down 1% on the day, according to CoinGecko. On Myriad, a prediction market owned by Decrypt's parent company Dastan, users put just a 6% chance on Strategy holding over 1 million BTC by 2027, down from 12% a week ago.