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Ahmed Barakat
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Bitcoin News: Michael Saylor’s Strategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) filed on June 29 to sell up to $1.25 billion worth of Bitcoin, framing the potential liquidation as a “Bitcoin Monetization Program” designed to bolster its cash reserve, cover preferred stock dividends, and service interest obligations.
The filing marks the most explicit structural retreat yet from the accumulate-at-all-costs playbook Saylor spent years selling to institutional and retail investors alike.
The proximate trigger was June 27, when Strategy’s mNAV, the ratio of its enterprise value to its Bitcoin holdings, fell below 1 for the first time.
That number is not just an optics problem. The entire capital model depended on trading at a premium to net Bitcoin value, which let the company issue equity and preferred stock to buy more BTC at accretive prices. With mNAV at 0.99, that flywheel has stalled.
Strategy’s cash reserve currently stands at approximately $2.55 billion. The company said any Bitcoin sales would be executed “from time to time” depending on market conditions and capital needs, language that keeps the door open without committing to a specific timeline or tranche size.
It also authorized two separate share repurchase programs of up to $1 billion each: one for its Class A common stock and one for its Digital Credit Securities, which cover the preferred stock series including STRK, STRF, and STRD.
The preferred stack is where the pressure concentrates. STRK carries an 8% annual dividend on roughly $584 million raised. STRF pays 10%, compounding to 18% if payments are missed, on $711 million raised. STRD, the most recent series, generated approximately $979.7 million in net proceeds at a 10% non-cumulative rate.
Combined, the annual preferred dividend burden exceeds $700 million. When Bitcoin was trading near its late-2025 highs around $125,000 and mNAV was firmly above 1, issuing new equity to cover those costs was trivially easy. At $60,000 Bitcoin with a sub-1 mNAV, it is not.
This is also not the first time Strategy has touched its Bitcoin treasury. On June 1 the company sold 32 BTC for approximately $2.5 million, a small transaction explicitly tied to funding preferred stock distributions. The June 29 filing raises the potential scale by several orders of magnitude.
Bitcoin price action heading into the filing had already done significant damage. BTC retested $58,000 last week alongside a $3 billion market outflow and a concurrent crash in MSTR shares, compressing Strategy’s NAV coverage at exactly the moment it needed room.
Bitcoin has since recovered modestly to approximately $60,175, but remains well off levels where Strategy’s model operated without friction. Options market structure around the $60,000 range has kept price action choppy, with no clean technical resolution yet.
Peter Schiff, gold advocate and longtime Bitcoin critic, did not miss the moment. In a June 29 post, Schiff said Strategy was “now a Bitcoin seller”, a pointed description given Saylor’s years of public messaging that Bitcoin should never be sold. Following the June 1 transaction, Schiff had written, “What Saylor giveth, Saylor taketh away,” arguing that the company’s aggressive accumulation had helped push Bitcoin price higher before this year’s reversal. His framing is polemical, but the underlying structural point, that Strategy’s buying was itself a price support mechanism that runs in reverse when the model flips, is not wrong.
Strategy has pushed back on the capitulation narrative, maintaining publicly that Bitcoin remains its “primary treasury reserve asset” and that liquidity management does not represent a change in long-term conviction.
The board also adopted a policy requiring at least 12 months of reserve coverage for preferred dividends and interest obligations. That is a meaningful governance shift toward balance-sheet discipline, and an implicit acknowledgment that market access can no longer be assumed.
MSTR shares traded at $82.31 at time of writing, down 3.5% on the day, continuing a sharp decline from the stock’s highs when Bitcoin was approaching $125,000. The contrast between those two data points tells the whole story: MSTR was not just a Bitcoin proxy, it was a leveraged bet on mNAV staying above 1. That condition no longer holds.
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Bitcoin News: MSTR, Does the $90 Level Hold, or Is the Model Still Repricing?
At $92, MSTR is holding just above what has emerged as near-term psychological support around $90. A breach of that level on volume would likely accelerate selling from holders who bought into the company as a premium Bitcoin vehicle, because the premium is now gone, and the equity offers neither the purity of direct BTC exposure nor the safety of a company generating operating cash flow to backstop the position.
The two $1 billion repurchase programs give management a tool to defend both the common stock and the preferred series, which is not nothing. Buybacks at these levels could provide a technical floor if deployed aggressively.
But repurchase authorization and actual deployment are different things, and the company’s first obligation is covering those preferred dividend payments before it can return capital to common holders.
The most likely near-term outcome is continued range-bound choppiness in MSTR between $80 and $89, with direction determined almost entirely by whether Bitcoin can reclaim $63,000 and hold it.
A recovery through that level would push mNAV back above 1 and reopen the equity issuance window. A continuation lower toward $55,000 would force a materially larger Bitcoin sale than the $1.25 billion ceiling currently authorized, and that scenario would likely reprice the entire preferred stack.
El Salvador, by contrast, has continued accumulating Bitcoin under IMF scrutiny, underscoring that not every institutional BTC holder faces the same structural constraints Strategy does. The next signal worth tracking is whether Strategy executes any material BTC sale in the coming two weeks and how the preferred series trades in response.
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