Strategy is selling bitcoin again: STRC buyback and dollar reserve up to $4.65 billion
Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) has once again resorted to selling bitcoins: this week, 1,690 BTC worth $108.6 million were written off its balance sheet. All proceeds were used to repurchase STRC preferred shares, which have recently been trading below par value.
This is the second consecutive week that the company has been a net seller of the leading cryptocurrency. A week earlier, Strategy sold 1,638 BTC. Thus, over two weeks, the reserve has shrunk by more than 3,300 coins, and the balance now holds 840,447 BTC — still the largest corporate bitcoin stockpile in the world.
Deal details and market reaction
The sales took place between August 3 and 9 at an average price of $64,262 per coin. The information was disclosed in a Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The buyback covered 1,152,020 STRC shares — perpetual preferred securities with a floating rate, issued to finance bitcoin investments. Their current dividend yield is reviewed monthly and stands at 12% per annum, which is designed to keep the price near the $100 par value.
However, the market has yet to embrace this structure. On Friday, STRC closed at $95.01 (+1.16% for the day), but over the past year the security has dipped to $71.25. In Monday's premarket, the share rose to $95.55. Support measures have partially worked: STRC has recovered about 33% from its lows, but it is still far from par.
Dollar reserve and MSTR sales
In parallel, Strategy sold 6,585,682 common MSTR shares through its at-the-market (ATM) program, raising $653.1 million. Of that, $650 million was directed into the dollar reserve, which now stands at $4.65 billion. CEO Michael Saylor called this week a "credit operation," emphasizing that the company is not abandoning bitcoin but merely optimizing its capital structure.
According to him, this extended the duration of the dollar reserve by 143 days — to 2.7 years — and reduced the STRC bitcoin credit by 10 basis points. Nearly the entire remaining quota was used for the preferred share buyback: only $785.2 million is now available, while the limit on issuing new MSTR shares remains virtually untouched — around $22 billion.
Why Strategy is selling bitcoin
These actions are directly tied to the Digital Credit Capital Framework approved in late June. It permits limited bitcoin sales to fund preferred share dividends, buybacks, and cash reserve replenishment when issuing new shares becomes less advantageous. Since the plan's launch, Strategy has effectively paused BTC purchases and is building up a fiat cushion that, according to the company, will cover payments across its entire preferred securities line for several years ahead.
At the time of writing, bitcoin is trading near $65,019 (+1.5% over the day), but it is still roughly 13% below Strategy's average purchase price ($75,385 per coin). Any sale at current levels locks in a loss relative to that mark.
My take: Strategy is transforming from a classic holder into an active capital manager, where bitcoin is just one of the tools. This reduces the "purity" of the bitcoin proxy for shareholders, but simultaneously strengthens the company's financial resilience. The question is how much longer investors are willing to pay for this hybrid case before they reassess its premium to NAV.