Bitcoin Giant Strategy Establishes $1.44 Billion USD Reserve—But Still Might Sell BTC

Bitcoin treasury company Strategy has formed a $1.44 billion U.S. dollar reserve as a vehicle to provide “very smooth continuous dividends,” even when Bitcoin is down.

While this appears to provide a buffer to prevent the company from selling part of its 3.1% stake in the total Bitcoin supply, Strategy did not rule out potentially having to sell BTC—with the company’s CEO mapping out what the future might look like if it did.

Strategy formed the USD reserve by selling MSTR equity over the past nine days, CEO Phong Le revealed in a December company update. The firm aims to have a minimum of 12 months’ worth of dividends, with the ultimate goal of expanding this reserve to cover over 24 months’ worth of dividends. 

“Bitcoin is volatile, and what we want to do is deliver a digital credit product to volatility-adverse investors, and we want to assure them that Bitcoin’s volatility is never going to impact their dividends,” Strategy co-founder and Executive Chairman Michael Saylor said on the call. “And so in order to do that, we added a U.S. dollar reserve.”

The move follows Le saying on the “What Bitcoin Did“ podcast last week that Strategy would sell its Bitcoin if its market-adjusted net asset value, aka mNAV, dropped below 1—meaning the company is valued lower than the value of the assets it holds. In the latest company update call, Strategy didn’t shy away from the claim but rather doubled down on it.

“There are skeptics and cynics that have been of the opinion that we couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or don’t have the will to sell Bitcoin in order to finance the dividends, and that sometimes becomes a negative short narrative. I think it’s important for us to dispel this notion,” Saylor said.

“Not only can the company sell Bitcoin in order to pay the dividends, the company can actually sell highly appreciated Bitcoin, pay the dividends, and then continuously increase its Bitcoin holdings in Bitcoin every quarter, forever,” he added.

Strategy became the leading digital asset treasury company after pivoting from its intelligence software solutions business in 2020. It now has a reserve of 650,000 BTC, worth approximately $56 billion, or about 3.1% of the total Bitcoin supply. That tally includes 130 BTC purchased over the last week, after the firm didn’t buy during the previous week.

Throughout this period, Saylor has publicly stated that you should “never sell your Bitcoin”—but his approach appears to have changed.

This is because the Bitcoin treasury firm’s business model relies on paying dividends to its holders. Its main avenue to raise money to pay these dividends is by issuing common equity; however, the company said in the call that this only makes sense when above an mNAV of 1. Once its mNAV drops below this level, it will consider selling Bitcoin or Bitcoin derivatives. If Strategy doesn’t want to do any of this, then it will use its new USD reserve to plug the hole.

“[The] ultimate goal is to have at least 24 months of dividends in U.S. dollars, so that even in a case where we aren’t able to or don’t want to issue equity, or we don’t want to sell Bitcoin, we can use the USD reserve to weather two years of dividend payments,” Le explained. 

In response to the announcement, MSTR has declined more than 8% to a recent price below $163 per share, according to Yahoo Finance. It is down 70% from its all-time high mark of $543 set last year, while Bitcoin has fallen nearly 32% to about $85,500 since setting an all-time high above $126,000 in October, according to CoinGecko. Strategy’s mNAV sits at 1.13, according to its website.

Despite growing fears that Strategy might sell Bitcoin, users on Myriad—a prediction market operated by Decrypt‘s parent company, Dastan—believe there is a slim 6% chance that this happens before the end of the year.