STRC, a dividend-paying preferred stock that Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) founder Michael Saylor has outrageously promoted as a competitor to high-yield bank accounts, traded 5.3% below its par value at one point today.
Multiple crypto derivatives of STRC are mirroring the crash.
No US bank account or money market is allowed to lose money like that, and such customers would enjoy FDIC and SIPC protection against loss, anyway.
Unfortunately, STRC has no insurance. Nor does Strategy guarantee its price or dividends. As of writing time, STRC and its unauthorised crypto proxies remain about 4% below their formerly stable trading range.
Despite its incredible risks, STRC has grown to a market capitalisation of $10 billion, more than triple its size at the start of the year.
It grew for one reason. Backed by a company holding tens of billions of dollars worth of bitcoin ($BTC), STRC pays an annualized dividend rate of 11.5% — far higher than traditional USD savings products.
Its promoters, like Saylor, CEO Phong Le, and a legion of others online, repeatedly insinuated that Strategy would pay dividends while STRC traded near $100, its quasi-peg that has nonetheless repeatedly failed to hold — including another panic this week.
Although Strategy will pay a monthly dividend of 0.96% on the full $100 par value of STRC this month, its stock price has already lost 3.8% of its value this month as of writing time, including a momentary loss of -5.3% intraday.
DeFi traders are stacking risks on top of Strategy’s risky STRC
STRC-backed stablecoins de-peg
As STRC has grown in size and popularity, crypto proxies proliferated for DeFi traders to buy, sell, leverage, loop, and borrow STRC-like products outside of the Nasdaq stock exchange.
Today, protocols like Apyx and Saturn offer derivatives partially backed by STRC. Enjoying demand for STRC’s generous dividends and supposed stability in a crypto-native wrapper, these protocols created stablecoins like apxUSD and Saturn sUSDat that traded near $1 with alluring stability for months.
This week, they’re mirroring the crash in STRC. Saturn sUSDat, with a market cap near $100 million, is trading 3.7% lower this week. Apxy’s stablecoin partially backed by STRC, apxUSD, has lost 4.1% of its value this week.
update
spoiler: its not looking good https://t.co/3LeYlGZsBU pic.twitter.com/oQHhfZUCmC
— Wazz (@WazzCrypto) June 3, 2026
The collapse has Saylor to blame, as well as another factor beyond his control. First, Saylor decided this week to renege on years of promises to never sell $BTC, the asset that underpins his entire strategy, including STRC, by having Strategy voluntarily sell $BTC for the first time since 2022.
Second, within 24 hours after the relatively small sale, $BTC plunged 4.4%. Worse, it kept crashing. Over the past week, $BTC has crashed 12%, and Strategy’s common stock is down 15%.
Saylor spent three years insisting that nobody should sell $BTC, including himself, but even he probably couldn’t have predicted that reversing his stance would precede such an immediately devastating crash.
STRC crashes alongside Strategy and its $BTC
Despite ads that liken STRC and its DeFi proxies to a low-volatility savings product with above-average yield, its quick decline this week demonstrates its broadly misunderstood risks.
Following the wider downward trend in crypto, STRC isn’t only dragging confidence in Strategy with it, but also a small cluster of crypto tokens.
Wrapping a wobbling dividend and a volatile stock inside a synthetic stablecoin was a clever idea, but it only proves that stablecoins are, despite their namesake, often unstable.
Between May 26 and May 31, Strategy sold 32 $BTC for roughly $2.5 million. It was the company’s first sale since December 2022, and the first net reduction in a stash that it had built to over 843,700 coins.
In its securities filing, the company noted that “proceeds from the $BTC sales are expected to be used to fund distributions on preferred stock.”
On Strategy’s Q1 earnings call last month, Saylor said the company would “probably sell some $BTC to fund a dividend just to inoculate the market.”
STRC launched in July 2025 paying 9%. Strategy has since raised the rate seven times, to 11.50%. The high payouts exist because the stock keeps slipping below the $100 share price Strategy promises to defend.
During STRC’s worst trading day in November 2025, shares hit $90.52.
