The 4,603 coins cost $369.7 million out of a $602.8 million stock sale; the rest went to STRC buybacks, dividends and cash. STRC still trades below par after $635 million of repurchases.
Strategy bought 4,603 bitcoin for $369.7 million in the week to 30 August, its first purchase since late June, at an average price of $80,318 including fees. The company disclosed the buy in an 8-K filed on 31 August. It now holds 845,050 bitcoin acquired for $63.73 billion, an average of $75,412 a coin.
That total is smaller than the one Strategy reported two months ago. At the end of June the company said it held 846,000 bitcoin, alongside an $8.22 billion quarterly loss driven almost entirely by fair-value markdowns. If that June figure was exact rather than rounded, Strategy has sold at least 5,553 coins since then, since it would need to have shed 950 net over the period while buying 4,603 last week. The company has not published a consolidated account of what it sold, at what price, or when. What it has published is a BTC Monetization Program that permits up to $5 billion of bitcoin sales to fund the reserve, dividends, interest payments and securities repurchases, and the 8-K arithmetic only works if that programme has been used.
Michael Saylor announced the return to buying the way he announces everything.
The money came from equity. Strategy sold 4,531,421 MSTR shares through its at-the-market programme for $602.8 million net of commissions, and the 8-K itemises where it went: $369.7 million to bitcoin, $151.8 million to repurchase 1,557,177 shares of its STRC perpetual preferred, $50.7 million to pay STRC dividends, and $30.0 million into the USD Cash account. Less than two-thirds of the equity raised went into the asset the equity is supposed to be a proxy for. The rest serviced and retired the instruments that were themselves sold to buy bitcoin.
STRC is the reason. Strategy has now spent $635.2 million buying back the security under a $1 billion authorisation, with the latest tranche executed at an average of $97.48. The buybacks have lifted STRC from a low of around $71 to about $97.34, but not to its $100 par, and $364.8 million of the preferred repurchase authorisation remains. A perpetual preferred trading below par cannot be sold at par through an ATM without diluting the holders who already own it, which is why STRC issuance for the week was zero and MSTR issuance was $602.8 million. The common shareholders are funding the preferred's price support.
There is a competitor making that harder. Strive's SATA pays a 13% annualised dividend daily against STRC's 12% paid semi-monthly, and it has held its $100 par for more than a week, which lets Strive issue more of it through its own ATM. That programme funded 1,800 bitcoin of purchases in the past week. ASST is up 60% this year; MSTR is down 15%, and down 63% from its summer 2025 peak. Strategy's enterprise mNAV, by its own dashboard, is 1.07, meaning the market values the company at barely more than its bitcoin. The premium that once let Saylor issue stock at twice the value of the coins behind it is gone, and with it the accretive mechanics that made the model work.
The balance sheet still has room. Strategy's USD Reserve, earmarked for preferred dividends and interest, stood at $5.10 billion on 30 August and USD Cash at $1.61 billion, both including ATM proceeds not yet settled. There is $19.09 billion of MSTR available for issuance under the ATM and a separate $1 billion common-stock buyback authorisation, untouched this week. Twenty One, the next-largest corporate holder at 43,514 coins, wrote $402 million off its bitcoin book in the second quarter; Strategy's markdown was twenty times that and it kept its dividends current.
The treasury model's smaller imitators have been forced into stranger shapes. H100 diluted shareholders by 70% to triple its stack, and MARA pledged more than half its treasury as security for a gas plant bid. Strategy is not there. But a company that holds 4% of all bitcoin that will ever exist spent a quarter of its weekly raise defending the price of its own preferred stock, and nobody outside the company knows how many coins it sold to get to the point where it could start buying again.
MSTR closed Friday at $127.31, up 6.3% on the week; bitcoin was up about 1% over the same period.
