Strategy Sells $216M in Bitcoin for Dividends Under 'BTC Monetization Program'

Strategy, the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, sold 3,588 BTC over the past week for around $216 million, according to a Monday disclosure. The proceeds funded dividends on its preferred shares and topped up its U.S. dollar reserve, which stood at $2.55 billion as of July 5.

The Michael Saylor-led firm, long known for buying and holding Bitcoin, has trimmed its stack to 843,775 BTC, carried at a cost basis of $63.7 billion, or about $75,476 per coin. With Bitcoin trading near $60,000, well below that, Strategy booked an $8.32 billion loss on its digital assets for the second quarter, almost all of it unrealized.

Strategy said a BTC Monetization Program it unveiled on June 29, which lets it raise up to $1.25 billion by selling Bitcoin, remained fully available as of July 5.

Although the company’s latest liquidation represented 0.42% of its overall stockpile, the sale yielded far more in proceeds than its sale of 32 Bitcoin for $2.5 million, which triggered the company’s worst weekly performance since 2022 and raised questions about whether market participations could look to the firm to buoy Bitcoin’s market.

Shares of Strategy fell 2% in pre-market trading to 98.88, according to Yahoo! Finance. The downturn put Strategy on track to snap a streak of five straight daily gains, exacerbating a 26% tumble in the company’s stock price over the past month.

Those losses stood in contrast with Bitcoin’s 3.7% increase over the same period. On Monday, the digital asset’s price steadied to around $62,900 before U.S. markets opened, after jumping as high as $63,700 over the weekend, according to CoinGecko data.

Strategy’s latest move follows its adoption of a capital management framework last week. The firm signaled that it could sell $1.25 billion worth of Bitcoin to shore up cash for dividend payments under the new plan, while authorizing $2 billion in stock buybacks.

At the same time, Strategy hiked the annual for Stretch (STRC) to 12% and expanded its so-called USD Reserve to $2.55 billion. The company said then that it would have enough resources to cover 26 months of dividend costs if it also tapped its Bitcoin stash.

On Sunday, Executive Chairman and co-founder Michael Saylor referred to Bitcoin as “Digital Energy,” while sharing a chart of the company’s latest purchases. The following morning, he predicted on X that changes in Bitcoin’s codebase won’t be as impactful on the digital asset’s evolution as deepening capital markets and an expansion of digital credit.