Strategy Sold Bitcoin Four Times This Year, and Its Stock Now Trades Below NAV

Strategy has sold Bitcoin four separate times in 2026, and Wall Street now values the company below the worth of the coins sitting in its own vault.

Michael Saylor built an entire company around the words "never sell." On August 10, Strategy disclosed its fourth Bitcoin sale of the year, offloading 1,690 BTC for $108.6 million between August 3 and August 9 at an average price of $64,262 a coin, according to a filing reported by Bloomberg and Fortune. That's roughly $11,000 below what Strategy paid for those coins on average. The company has now sold 6,948 BTC in 2026 alone.

The money isn't going back into more Bitcoin. It's funding dividends and buybacks on STRC, one of Strategy's preferred stock issues, and topping up a US dollar reserve that Bloomberg reported has grown to $4.65 billion. Strategy still holds close to 840,000 BTC, worth roughly $54 billion at current prices. The company calls the selling "capital management." CryptoQuant analysts, cited by Yahoo Finance, put the cumulative realized losses from this year's sales north of $102 million.

If you bought Strategy stock as a wager that management would never blink, you lost that bet in August. Four sales this year. Nearly 7,000 coins gone.

Strategy's whole playbook depended on one number staying above 1: mNAV, the multiple of net asset value that compares the company's market worth to the Bitcoin it holds. Above 1, Strategy could sell shares at a premium, funnel the cash into more Bitcoin, and let the widening premium justify the next raise. That's how it built a treasury of more than 840,000 coins in four years. On August 3, that mechanism cracked. Strategy's basic mNAV read 0.68, a discount that Forbes and Yahoo Finance both flagged as unprecedented for the company, and down sharply from a peak near 3.4 in November 2024.

The ratio has bounced around the line since, with some trackers showing it back near 1.07 in recent days. But even a brief dip below 1 breaks the logic the entire corporate Bitcoin treasury trade was built on. Issuing new shares while trading at a discount to your own Bitcoin doesn't buy more Bitcoin anymore. It just dilutes existing shareholders. So Strategy stopped buying and started selling, precisely the reversal Saylor spent four years insisting would never happen.

Saylor has been walking that back in public. At the Bitcoin Prague conference this year, he told the crowd he never actually promised the company itself would never sell, that "never sell your Bitcoin" was always personal advice for individual holders, not corporate policy. It's a fine distinction, and one that will be lost on anyone who watched him say the opposite, repeatedly, since 2022.

Every company that copied Strategy now has the same problem

Dozens of firms rushed to copy Strategy's model over the past two years, raising capital specifically to stack Bitcoin on their balance sheets and let a rising mNAV do the rest. Strategy was the proof of concept. If the pioneer, sitting on 840,000 BTC and a four-year head start, can't hold its premium, smaller treasury companies with thinner balance sheets and far less market trust have much less room to fall before the same math turns against them.

Strategy is also leaning harder on its preferred stock to bridge the gap. STRC closed at $89.46 on July 31, according to News.Bitcoin.com, roughly 10 to 11 percent below its $100 par value even after the company raised its dividend rate to the highest level since the security launched in 2025. Strategy shifted STRC to semi-monthly payments in July, and the August Bitcoin sale funded that dividend directly. In May, Saylor rebranded the whole operating model as a "Digital Credit Capital Framework," a label that quietly moved the company's stated priority from accumulating Bitcoin at any cost to servicing preferred stock obligations and holding a stable cash reserve.

That's a different company than the one investors bought into.

Strategy's stock is still up from where it started, and Saylor still controls enough voting power to keep running the company his way. But the August numbers tell their own story: four sales, nearly 7,000 coins gone, more than $102 million in realized losses, and a market that, for the first time since Strategy went all in on Bitcoin, isn't willing to pay more for the stock than the coins underneath it are worth.

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