Bitcoin Treasury Companies: $80B Lost, and Even Strategy Sold 6,948 Bitcoin

On 29 June 2026, the board of Strategy Inc approved something its founder had spent six years saying would never happen. In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Virginia company, known as MicroStrategy until February 2025 and the largest corporate owner of bitcoin in the world, announced a "BTC Monetization Program". Stripped of the branding, it was permission to sell bitcoin. Within six weeks the company had sold 6,948 of them.

Strategy was the model for an entire industry. From 2024 onwards, dozens of listed companies copied its plan: raise money from investors, buy bitcoin with it, repeat. They became known as bitcoin treasury companies. In July 2025 the 50 largest were worth about $150 billion on the stock market, according to figures published by the Financial Times. By August 2026 they were worth about $67 billion. More than $80 billion had gone, and Strategy's own fall from its peak accounted for roughly $79 billion of it.

The premium was the business

A share trader already knows the machinery, because it is the machinery of a closed-end fund. A closed-end fund holds a basket of assets and trades on an exchange like any other stock. Its shares can trade above the value of what it owns (a premium) or below it (a discount). The crypto industry gave this ratio its own name, mNAV: the company's market value divided by the value of its bitcoin, the "net asset value". An mNAV of 2 means investors are paying $2 for every $1 of bitcoin inside.

Strategy's plan only worked while that number stayed above 1. If the shares traded at twice the value of the bitcoin behind them, the company could sell $1 billion of new shares, buy $1 billion of bitcoin, and every existing shareholder ended up owning slightly more bitcoin per share than before. Strategy called this "BTC Yield" and reported it every quarter. Bitcoin, the digital currency capped at 21 million coins, pays no interest and no dividend. The yield came entirely from investors being willing to pay more for the shares than the coins were worth.

Strategy bought its first bitcoin in August 2020: 21,454 coins for $250 million. As the pile grew, the money came less from ordinary shares and more from debt and preferred stock. It sold convertible bonds (loans that can turn into shares) and a family of preferred shares called Strife, Strike, Stride and Stretch, paying fixed dividends of 8 to 12 per cent a year. Preferred dividends have to be paid in cash. Bitcoin produces none.

What the founder said

Michael Saylor, Strategy's co-founder and executive chairman, built the brand on never selling. In January 2022, with bitcoin down about 40 per cent, he told Bloomberg: "We're not sellers. We're only acquiring and holding bitcoin." On 28 February 2025, with bitcoin below $80,000, he posted on X: "Sell a kidney if you must, but keep the Bitcoin." On 10 February 2026 he told CNBC's Squawk Box: "We're not going to be selling. We're going to be buying bitcoin." He added: "I expect we'll be buying bitcoin every quarter forever."

Saylor was no stranger to regulators. In December 2000 he paid $8.28 million in disgorgement and a $350,000 civil penalty to settle SEC claims that MicroStrategy had overstated its revenue, without admitting or denying the allegations. In June 2024 he and the company paid $40 million to settle a District of Columbia tax fraud lawsuit over where he really lived, again admitting no wrongdoing.

When the premium died

Bitcoin peaked at about $126,000 in October 2025 and then roughly halved. Strategy reported a net loss of $12.54 billion for the first quarter of 2026 and $8.22 billion for the second, most of it the paper fall in the value of its coins. On the first-quarter earnings call on 5 May 2026, Saylor changed his tune: "We will probably sell some bitcoin to pay a dividend just to inoculate the market and send the message that we did it." He summed up the new model: "You buy bitcoin with credit, you let it appreciate, and then you sell bitcoin to pay the dividend."

The first sale was tiny: 32 bitcoin for $2.5 million in the last week of May. Then, in late June, with bitcoin near $60,000, the premium disappeared. CoinDesk reported on 27 June that Strategy's enterprise value (its shares plus debt and preferred stock, minus cash) had fallen to about $50.4 billion, against bitcoin worth about $51.1 billion. The mNAV was 0.99, the first reading below 1 in the company's history. The market was valuing the whole business at less than its coins. The shares were around $82, about 85 per cent below their November 2024 high.

©CMZ chart. Data: Strategy SEC filings

Below 1, the machine runs backwards. Selling new shares at a discount to buy bitcoin shrinks the bitcoin behind each existing share. The bills did not stop: dividends and interest came to about $1.5 billion a year.

Strategy's weekly filings say exactly where the money from its coins went. The 3,588 bitcoin sold between 29 June and 5 July "were used to fund payment of distributions on preferred stock" and to refill a cash pile the company calls its USD Reserve. The 1,638 sold in the week to 2 August paid dividends and bought back Stretch preferred shares, which had been changing hands for about $86.53 against a face value of $100. All the proceeds of the 1,690 sold in the week to 9 August, at an average $64,262 a coin, went on buying back more Stretch. Every coin sold from late June onwards went for less than the average of about $75,400 Strategy had paid.

On 3 August, Saylor explained himself on X: "When I say 'Never Sell Your Bitcoin,' I speak as one saver to another. I have never sold mine. Not one satoshi. Strategy is a public company, not my wallet." A satoshi is the smallest unit of bitcoin, one hundred-millionth of a coin. The company, he added, had disclosed since 2020 that it might buy or sell.

The copycats cash out

The smaller imitators had less room. Satsuma Technology, listed in London, watched its shares fall more than 99 per cent from their June 2025 peak. On 20 July 2026 its shareholders voted to sell all its bitcoin, hand the cash back and leave the London Stock Exchange. It sold about 669 coins for £31.9 million.

The Smarter Web Company, another UK firm, sold 177.89 bitcoin on 23 July to repay an $11.7 million convertible loan early. Its chief executive, Andrew Webley, said such instruments were not currently the right way to raise money. Nakamoto, the Nasdaq-listed company founded by David Bailey, sold 284 bitcoin in March to pay running costs, at 40 per cent below what it had paid, with its shares down about 99 per cent from their May 2025 high.

Sequans Communications, a French chip designer, sold bitcoin to repay the convertible debt it had raised to buy it, then on 24 September 2026 sold its last 314 coins. Chief executive Georges Karam called it "the completion of our Bitcoin treasury strategy". Bitcoin miners Bitdeer and MARA Holdings sold coins to help pay for data centres for artificial intelligence. In July 2026, the FT reported, the 50 largest treasury companies sold more bitcoin than they bought for the first time since the trend began.