Strategy adds to Bitcoin hoard

Strategy has bought another 4,871 Bitcoin for $329.9 million, extending the company’s long-running cryptocurrency accumulation plan and taking its total holdings to 766,970 BTC as of April 5, according to a regulatory filing released on April 6. The company said the latest purchases were made at an average price of $67,718 per Bitcoin, lifting its aggregate spend on the token to about $58.02 billion since it began buying in 2020.

The filing also corrects an important point about how the purchase was funded. Strategy said the Bitcoin was bought using proceeds from sales under its at-the-market programme, and the figures in the filing show that between April 1 and April 5 it raised money mainly by selling Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock, traded as STRC, alongside sales of Class A common stock, traded as MSTR. There were no STRK sales recorded in that April 1 to April 5 window, meaning the latest purchase was financed largely through STRC, not STRK, with a smaller contribution from common shares.

According to the same disclosure, Strategy sold 1,027,255 STRC shares for net proceeds of about $102.6 million and 593,294 MSTR shares for net proceeds of about $72 million during April 1 to April 5. In the preceding March 30 to March 31 period, it had also sold 2,275,972 STRC shares for roughly $227.3 million in net proceeds and 582,550 MSTR shares for about $72 million. The combined fund-raising across those windows underlines how Strategy continues to use a mix of equity-linked instruments and common stock issuance to support its Bitcoin treasury model.

Strategy’s latest update showed no Bitcoin acquisitions during March 30 and March 31, when its holdings stood at 762,099 BTC with an aggregate purchase price of $57.69 billion and an average acquisition cost of $75,694 per Bitcoin. By April 5, after the new buying, the company’s average purchase price across all holdings had edged down slightly to $75,644. That leaves Strategy controlling well over 3 per cent of Bitcoin’s capped 21 million supply, a concentration that continues to set it apart from every other listed corporate holder of the asset.

The purchase lands at a time when the company’s Bitcoin balance sheet is also producing sharp swings in reported results. Strategy said that for the three months ended March 31 it posted a $14.46 billion unrealised loss on digital assets, alongside a $2.42 billion associated deferred tax benefit. As of the end of March, it reported a digital asset carrying value of $51.65 billion and a related deferred tax asset of $1.73 billion, fully offset by a valuation allowance of the same size. The company added that because the fair value of its Bitcoin holdings was below cost basis at March 31, it also expected to establish an additional valuation allowance of about $0.5 billion against deferred tax assets tied to its software operations.

Those numbers highlight the central tension in Strategy’s approach. Michael Saylor, the company’s executive chairman and the most prominent corporate advocate of Bitcoin accumulation, has turned what was once a software company best known as MicroStrategy into a highly leveraged Bitcoin proxy for equity investors. Supporters argue that the model offers shareholders amplified exposure to the world’s biggest cryptocurrency through a listed vehicle. Critics counter that the structure leaves the company heavily exposed to market downturns, dilution from repeated share sales and volatility in accounting results that can overwhelm the underlying software business. That debate has only intensified as Strategy has expanded the range of securities it uses to finance its purchases.

The latest filing also points to the scale of capital Strategy still has available for future purchases. A footnote states that, as previously disclosed on March 23, the company added a new $21 billion offering of STRC stock, a new $21 billion offering of MSTR stock, terminated its prior STRK offering and replaced it with a new $2.1 billion STRK programme. As of April 5, Strategy still had more than $22.6 billion of STRC issuance capacity, about $27.1 billion of MSTR capacity, $2.1 billion of STRK capacity and roughly $4 billion of STRD capacity remaining.