Bitcoin Magazine

Strategy (MSTR) Sells $263.5 Million in MSTR Shares, Skips Bitcoin Purchase as USD Reserve Tops $3.2 Billion

Strategy sold about $263.5 million worth of MSTR shares last week and made no bitcoin purchases, according to an 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday.

The bitcoin treasury company reported the sale of 2,732,318 MSTR shares between July 13 and July 19. Proceeds went toward a $225 million boost to the firm’s U.S. dollar reserve, which reached $3.225 billion as of July 19. Strategy bought no bitcoin, sold no bitcoin, and repurchased no shares under its buyback programs across the period.

The company’s bitcoin stack holds at 843,775 BTC, a position worth around $54.7 billion at current prices. Strategy acquired the coins for about $63.7 billion, including fees and expenses, at an average price of $75,476 per bitcoin, according to co-founder and executive chairman Michael Saylor.

That total represents around 4% of bitcoin’s 21 million supply cap. At present prices, the position carries about $9 billion in paper losses.

The dollar reserve has climbed across a run of similar weeks. A prior filing put the balance near $3 billion after a $467 million share sale, and the fresh $225 million addition marks a continued tilt toward cash as management builds a buffer against the firm’s debt load.

Strategy’s bitcoin buying pause

The pause extends a pattern. Strategy has leaned on dollar accumulation over fresh bitcoin buys across recent weeks, a shift from the aggressive purchases that have reshaped corporate finance and defined much of its history.

Saylor posted another Strategy bitcoin acquisition tracker chart to X on Sunday with the caption “What’s next?” Posts of that kind have preceded acquisition announcements the next day, though the firm’s approach has varied across recent weeks.

Company leadership frames the sales as a matter of balance-sheet strength rather than retreat. President and CEO Phong Le told Bloomberg TV last week that Strategy intends to remain a long-term bitcoin buyer. Le said the firm would begin weighing risks tied to its debt in the event bitcoin dropped to the $8,000 to $10,000 range, and described the balance sheet as secure. 

The stance matches Saylor’s repeated pledge that Strategy will keep buying bitcoin for years, a message he has held even through defenses of potential BTC sales.

Saylor turned his attention to Bitcoin’s protocol over the weekend. He published a 110-point essay, “110 Reasons BIP 110 Is a Bad Idea,” his most detailed case against the proposed soft fork that seeks to limit arbitrary data on the network.

The essay arrived ahead of BIP-110’s mandatory signaling window, which opens in early August. Miner support sits at 0.86% per the proposal’s public monitor. 

Bitcoin mining pool Foundry has asked miners to vote on the measure, and industry voices have flagged the fork as one on track to fail given weak signaling.

Analyst reaction to Strategy’s dollar buildup has been warm. JPMorgan analysts called the larger cash reserves and improving institutional demand in bitcoin futures “encouraging signs” for the bitcoin outlook, even as spot bitcoin ETF flows stay volatile. 

Strategy sits atop a crowded field. Bitcoin Treasuries data counts 197 public companies with some form of bitcoin acquisition model, a tally that pushed corporate bitcoin holdings to a record high. Tether-backed Twenty One, Metaplanet, MARA, and the Adam Back and Cantor Fitzgerald-backed Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company round out the top five, with 43,514 BTC, 43,000 BTC, 36,303 BTC, and 30,021 BTC.

The stock has struggled. MSTR fell 4% across last week and closed Friday at $94.85, a drop of 38.6% year-to-date. Bitcoin gained around 1% over the same stretch, a split that widens the gap between the firm’s treasury value and its market capitalization.

Strategy shares were up 2% in pre-market trading.

This post Strategy (MSTR) Sells $263.5 Million in MSTR Shares, Skips Bitcoin Purchase as USD Reserve Tops $3.2 Billion first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

FBI Director Kash Patel Did Not Disclose Six-Figure Strategy (MSTR) Stake: Report

FBI Director Kash Patel disclosed a six-figure investment in Strategy (MSTR), the world’s largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, more than six months past the deadline set by federal ethics law, according to a report from NOTUS. The lapse has reopened a fight over stock trading by senior government officials and raised questions about a potential conflict of interest.

Patel purchased between $100,001 and $250,000 in shares of Strategy on November 21, 2025. He did not report the trade to federal regulators until May 26, 2026, a gap of more than 180 days. The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act requires senior executive-branch officials to disclose individual stock trades over $1,000 within 45 days of the transaction.

In his May 26 letter to the Office of Government Ethics, Patel said the trade had been “inadvertently omitted” from a prior filing. Two days later, Deputy Assistant Attorney General William Taylor attributed the omission to a miscommunication, and an FBI official told NOTUS the late reporting was “not realized and unintentional.” 

First-time STOCK Act violators face a $200 fine. The Department of Justice, which would issue or waive the penalty, has not fined Patel. The bureau said the corrected filing was reviewed and approved by a DOJ ethics official.

Why Patel’s stock omission is drawing attention

Strategy, the firm led by Michael Saylor, pioneered the corporate Bitcoin-treasury model and holds more than 760,000 BTC. The stock functions as a proxy for the price of Bitcoin, which makes it one of the most direct routes to a Bitcoin bet through a brokerage account. Strategy’s shares have lost about half their value since the date of Patel’s purchase.

The identity of the company is the crux of the concern. The FBI, under Patel, plays a central role in cryptocurrency enforcement, and Patel has promoted that record.

In a June 19 post on X, he warned crypto fraudsters that “this FBI will find you, and we will bring you to justice.” Weeks before his purchase, he had touted a case that seized roughly $15 billion 

Strategy has done millions of dollars in business with the Justice Department, of which the FBI is a part, along with the Departments of Health and Human Services, Defense, and State, over the past decade, according to the report.

Taylor maintained that Patel’s stake does not create a conflict of interest with his oversight of the bureau.

Patel is not an outlier. Vice President JD Vance disclosed up to $500,000 in Bitcoin, and President Trump and his sons reported more than $1 billion in crypto-related income last year. 

This post FBI Director Kash Patel Did Not Disclose Six-Figure Strategy (MSTR) Stake: Report first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Preferred Stock Is Becoming Bitcoin Treasury Firms’ Financing Tool of Choice: Report

A new class of Wall Street securities has grown from an experiment into a multibillion-dollar market in under two years, and a June 2026 research report from BitcoinTreasuries.net argues the expansion has just begun.

The report, produced in partnership with the DeFi protocol Apyx, tracks the rise of preferred shares issued by public companies and backed by their bitcoin holdings. Such shares now carry a combined market value of about $13 billion. That figure represents close to 1% of the $1.3 trillion global preferred market, a share the report’s authors expect to reach 3 to 5% by 2030 and as much as 10%, or $130 billion, beyond that horizon.

The instrument sits at the center of a financing puzzle facing companies that hold bitcoin as a treasury asset. Firms such as Strategy, led by Michael Saylor, want long-duration capital to buy more bitcoin without diluting common shareholders or taking on debt that must be repaid at a fixed date. Bitcoin’s price swings make that balance difficult. 

Bitcoin traded near $124,720 in October 2025, then fell to below $60,000s by mid-June 2026, a drawdown of about 47% in eight months.

Preferred shares offer a path around the problem. When a company issues them, its common share count does not rise, so existing owners avoid dilution. The shares are classified as equity rather than debt, which means no maturity date and no forced repayment. In exchange, holders receive a dividend that ranks ahead of common stock.

 For income investors shut out of bitcoin’s upside, the structure converts the token’s volatility into a yield product.

Preferred shares are pushing Bitcoin expansion

Those yields dwarf what fixed-income markets pay. The five main bitcoin-backed preferred securities in the U.S. carry effective yields between 10.8% and 15.2%, against the 3 to 4%offered on high-yield savings accounts. 

Strategy’s lineup accounts for most of the market: STRF, STRC, STRK and STRD together hold a market value near $12.5 billion. Strive, an asset manager turned bitcoin treasury company, issued a fifth security, SATA, with a market value around $330 million.

The report’s central claim is that demand outstrips supply. Fixed-income institutions such as mutual funds, banks, pensions and insurers hold $10.9 trillion in U.S. treasuries. A shift of 10 to 20 basis points from that pool would generate $10.9 billion to $21.8 billion in demand, enough to validate the near-term market projection on its own. 

Supply, though, is capped by the amount of bitcoin available as collateral. Of the 20 million bitcoins in circulation, holdings in exchanges, spot ETFs and mining firms are excluded as customer assets or operating reserves. 

That leaves the 1.26 million bitcoins held in corporate treasuries, worth about $83 billion. Strategy alone controls some 845,000 of them, or 67%.

Collateral coverage is the feature the report leans on to make the case for safety. Bitcoin-backed preferreds maintain coverage ratios of 3.8 to 4.5 times, meaning issuers hold $3.80 to $4.50 in bitcoin for every $1 of preferred equity.

 By comparison, the median large-bank mortgage in the third quarter of 2025 advanced 76 cents against every dollar of home value. “The security of these instruments is significantly higher than 95% of the bonds in the market,” Jeff Walton, chief risk officer at Strive, said in the report, “because they’re actually backed by capital, not future cash flows.”

Not every firm qualifies to issue. Walton set out requirements: a clean balance sheet free of senior secured debt, scale to support an issuance of $100 million or more, and a team versed in tax treatment, covenant design and dividend policy. 

Encumbered bitcoin, he said, ranks ahead of preferred equity and would block most deals. Strive itself used a $225 million SATA offering in January to retire debt inherited from its acquisition of Semler Scientific, a move that left all of its bitcoin unencumbered.

The risks are structural rather than hidden. Strategy’s common stock, MSTR, acts as a volatility amplifier, and it has fallen more than bitcoin over the past year. “When bitcoin’s price declines, Strategy’s will dip more,” said Tony Lau, an investment partner at Primitive Ventures, who described a possible cascade in the stock. 

Three of the four Strategy preferreds trade at discounts to their $100 par value. The dividends themselves depend on a company’s ability to keep raising capital against a rising bitcoin price, though both Strategy and Strive have disclosed cash reserves sufficient to cover at least twelve months of payments.

Strategy CEO Phong Le told investors in February that the firm’s balance sheet holds unless bitcoin falls to $8,000 and stays there for five or six years.

For now, the report frames preferred equity as an instrument in its “0 to 1 moment” — a market where appetite exceeds what issuers can produce, and where the gap favors the companies willing to build the product.

This post Preferred Stock Is Becoming Bitcoin Treasury Firms’ Financing Tool of Choice: Report first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.