Strategy, the Michael Saylor-led firm formerly known as MicroStrategy, has surpassed BlackRock’s flagship Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) to become the world’s largest institutional holder of Bitcoin.
According to a regulation dated April 20 submit Together with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Strategy acquired an additional 34,164 Bitcoin over the past week at an average price of $74,395 per coin.
The purchase cost approximately $2.54 billion and is the third largest acquisition in the company’s history by number of coins.
The latest transaction increased Strategy’s total Bitcoin holdings to 815,061 BTC, or approximately 3.88% of the token’s total supply.
The company has spent approximately $61.56 billion building that position, giving it an average cost base of $75,527 per coin. With a Bitcoin trading value of about $75,000, the company’s assets are worth about $61.2 billion, leaving the portfolio with an unrealized loss of more than $228 million.
Strategy’s Bitcoin stake turns BlackRock IBIT
Meanwhile, the size of the latest purchase is remarkable even on its own. The 34,164 Bitcoins acquired this week alone would make a company the fifth largest corporate holder in the world.
Those gains were enough to push Strategy past BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), the world’s largest Bitcoin fund. IBIT currently owns 798,026 Bitcoin after previously overtaking Strategy in the first quarter of 2024 following the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States.
The comparison is significant because the two vehicles represent different forms of Bitcoin exposure. The BlackRock fund holds Bitcoin on behalf of retail and institutional investors through a regulated Wall Street structure.
Strategy, on the other hand, is a publicly traded company that has increasingly turned itself into a leveraged BTC treasury, using the debt and equity markets to expand its reserves.
Against that backdrop, the only entity widely believed to hold more Bitcoin remains the network’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, whose inactive wallets are estimated to hold around 1.1 million coins.
Meanwhile, Strategy Chief Executive Officer Phong Le said the latest purchase boosted the company’s Bitcoin returns by 82% to $4.97 billion for the year in just one week.
He said the result demonstrated the reflexive power of combining an appreciating digital asset with accrual debt financing.
Analysts who track the company’s accumulation rate predict that Strategy could reach the 1 million Bitcoin mark before the end of the year.
STRC becomes central to the model
The latest purchase also underscored how heavily Strategy now relies on its favorite securities to fund its Bitcoin strategy, without relying too heavily on common stock dilution.
According to the filing, the company’s perpetual preferred security known as Stretch generated $2.18 billion last week, accounting for about 85.7% of the proceeds used to buy the security.
Notably, STRC also funded all of Strategy’s $1 billion worth of Bitcoin purchases for the week ending April 12. Designed to trade near a par value of $100, STRC offers investors a variable dividend with an annual percentage rate of 11.5%. The dividend is reset monthly.
Strategy executives have previously said the structure is intended to keep stock trading close to price while limiting sharper swings in valuation.
In practice, Stretch has become a core part of the company’s financing machinery, with the Saylor-led company acquiring nearly 100,000 BTC with STRC.
As such, Strategy is no longer just a software company with a Bitcoin treasury attached to it. It is increasingly a Bitcoin acquisition vehicle funded through a stack of public market instruments including common stock, preferred stock and other securities.
The company has said it is using proceeds from equity and debt financings, along with cash flow from operations, to accumulate Bitcoin as its main treasury reserve.
A well-known pattern in the market
While the financing structure behind Strategy’s purchases has become more sophisticated, the market’s reaction to these announcements has remained relatively consistent.
Major revelations about strategic buying have often functioned as buy-the-rumor, sell-the-news events for Bitcoin, rather than immediate bullish catalysts. By the time the filing is published, traders have often already positioned for demand.
Andre Dragosch, head of research at Bitwise Europe, said:
“Major strategic purchase announcements have historically been ‘sell-the-news’ events for Bitcoin. Likely countercyclical behavior, as the purchase is already old news by the time it is announced and traders expect less buying next week.”
This view is supported by Bitwise Europe’s research, which shows that big Strategy acquisition announcements rarely translate into immediate benefit after going public. Instead, Bitcoin has historically tended to weaken in the hours following the filing.
The company’s research into 100 Strategy Bitcoin purchase announcements since August 2020 found that the asset typically peaks about two hours before the company makes the transaction public. Once the application is released, the price tends to go lower.
Bitwise’s data shows that the index performance fell to 99.97 within 30 minutes of an announcement and fell to 99.96 after an hour, before attempting a partial recovery.
The size of the purchase also seems to matter. For the top 10% of purchases by volume, which typically attract the most market attention, Bitcoin has typically risen in disclosure and then sold off once the news was confirmed, with weakness continuing over the next two hours.
That pattern is consistent with known market dynamics. Traders price in expected demand in advance, leaving limited room for upside potential once the purchase is formally announced.
Meanwhile, smaller acquisitions have often had the opposite effect. The bottom 10% of Strategy Buy tranches have been associated with relatively flat price action prior to the announcement, followed by steadier gains in the two hours following the disclosure.
Taking this into account, Bitwise argues that quieter accumulation is less vulnerable to front-running and can therefore provide a better signal of continued demand than the company’s largest, front-page news purchases.
For that reason, market analysts caution against treating Strategy’s weekly shares as a reliable short-term trading signal.