In brief
- Strategy has started selling Bitcoin to fund dividends on its preferred stock, a shift from its long-standing “never sell” stance that has unsettled the market.
- Standard Chartered calls the selling “mostly noise” and a communication problem, and is sticking to its end-2026 Bitcoin forecast of $100,000.
- Bitcoin trades around $64,440, up 3.8% on the week but down 42% on the year, while Myriad traders give Strategy a slim chance of holding 1 million $BTC this year.
Strategy’s turn from hoarding Bitcoin to selling it, in order to pay dividends on its preferred stock, has “muddied” Bitcoin’s near-term prospects, according to a new Standard Chartered note that nonetheless urges investors to look past it.
Last week, Bitcoin treasury company Strategy sold 3,588 $BTC for about $216 million between June 29 and July 5 to cover preferred-share dividends and top up a cash reserve, leaving it with 843,775 $BTC. That came after a token sale of just 32 $BTC in early June that triggered its worst week since 2022.
In a note published Friday, Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick wrote that the bank sees the sales as “mostly noise rather than a signal” of Bitcoin’s medium-term direction, and kept its end-2026 forecast of $100,000.
Strategy’s mNAV issue
For years Strategy ran a simple machine: as long as its shares traded well above the value of its Bitcoin holdings, a premium captured by a metric called mNAV, it could issue stock, buy more $BTC, and lift both its own valuation and Bitcoin’s price. That premium has evaporated.
Standard Chartered puts mNAV at around 1 on an enterprise-value basis, while equity-based trackers land lower: BitcoinTreasuries has the stock at around 0.7 times the value of its Bitcoin on a diluted basis, a discount of roughly a third. Either way, the machine has stalled. Strategy’s $BTC stack, bought for $63.7 billion, is worth around $54 billion at current prices, and the firm booked an $8.3 billion loss on its digital assets last quarter, almost all of it unrealized.
Backing the STRC dividend
With the accumulation model stalled, Strategy is repurposing its Bitcoin as collateral for STRC, a perpetual preferred stock known as “Stretch” that pays a 12% annual dividend and has about $10 billion outstanding, per Standard Chartered.
The shares are designed to trade near their $100 par value, but they slid to an intraday low of $71.25 on June 26 after the company disclosed its first Bitcoin sale earlier that month. Price action since suggests “the market has yet to be fully convinced of this pivot,” Kendrick wrote. Under a “$BTC Monetization Program” unveiled on June 29, Strategy can raise up to $1.25 billion by selling Bitcoin to keep the dividends funded.
Kendrick argued that clear communication is “key to reassuring markets that wholesale selling is unlikely,” which should pull STRC back toward its $100 par and, in turn, ease pressure on Bitcoin. Because the stock is “heavily over-collateralised” by the Bitcoin behind it, he wrote, effective signaling could remove the need for Strategy to sell any more at all. The analyst noted that the reserve behind the dividend now holds $2.55 billion, almost a year and a half of coverage.
What the market thinks
Bitcoin changed hands around $64,440 on Friday, up 3.8% on the week but down 42% over the past year and about 49% below its October 2025 record of $126,080, per CoinGecko data.
Traders are doubtful Strategy’s buying spree will resume at full tilt. A market on Myriad, a prediction platform owned by Decrypt‘s parent company Dastan, puts the chance of the company holding more than 1 million $BTC before 2027 at around 13%. Strategy holds 843,775 today, more than 4% of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist.
