Michael Saylor's Strategy bought 34,164 bitcoin last week for $2.54 billion, vaulting past BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust to become the largest institutional holder of the cryptocurrency.
Michael Saylor's Strategy bought 34,164 bitcoin last week for $2.54 billion, vaulting past BlackRock to become the world's largest institutional holder of the cryptocurrency.
The purchase — the company's third-largest on record and its biggest since November 2024 — was made between 13 and 19 April at an average price of $74,395 per coin. Strategy funded the bulk of the acquisition through the sale of $2.18 billion in Stretch (STRC) perpetual preferred shares, with the remaining $366 million raised from common stock sales. Saylor confirmed the figures in a post on X.
Strategy now holds 815,061 bitcoin acquired for roughly $61.56 billion at an average cost of $75,527 per coin. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), by comparison, holds 802,823 BTC — making Strategy's lead a little over 12,000 coins. The gap is notable not because of its size but because of what it represents: a publicly traded software company outpacing the world's largest asset manager in a direct race to accumulate a single asset.
The two entities built their positions in fundamentally different ways. BlackRock's IBIT amassed its holdings through investor inflows following the spot bitcoin ETF approvals in January 2024 — a passive accumulation that tracks demand rather than corporate conviction. Strategy, by contrast, has been buying bitcoin deliberately since August 2020, financing purchases through an increasingly creative array of equity offerings, convertible notes, and now preferred shares that pay dividends funded by the very bitcoin they help acquire. It is a financial structure that only works if you believe the underlying asset will compound indefinitely.
With bitcoin trading around $75,000, Strategy is roughly at break-even on its entire $61.56 billion position. MSTR stock, however, is down 48 per cent over the past twelve months, trading at $166.52 — a reflection of the broader collapse in corporate bitcoin treasury demand that has left Strategy increasingly isolated among its imitators. The stock did surge 10 per cent on 17 April when the firm's cost basis briefly dipped below spot, but that kind of volatility underscores how tightly MSTR trades as a leveraged bitcoin proxy rather than an operating business.
Saylor's framing has shifted accordingly. In a recent interview with Bankless, he described Strategy as a "digital credit machine" — effectively conceding that the company's value proposition is no longer software but its ability to convert capital markets access into bitcoin holdings. The BTC yield metric he now publishes weekly, currently 9.5 per cent year-to-date, measures how much bitcoin per share the company generates through dilution-funded purchases. It is an unusual metric; it conflates share dilution with investment return in a way that would make a traditional CFO deeply uncomfortable.
Whether this approach is genius or recklessness depends entirely on one's view of bitcoin's long-term trajectory. If bitcoin appreciates faster than Strategy's blended cost of capital — which Saylor pegs at roughly 2.05 per cent annually — the preferred dividends fund themselves and shareholders profit. If it doesn't, the growing tower of obligations becomes a problem. The company held 762,000 BTC worth $57 billion just last month; adding another $2.54 billion in a single week shows that Saylor is not slowing down, even as the broader market struggles to hold $75,000.
For now, the crown sits with Strategy. But BlackRock's position is entirely demand-driven — if bitcoin ETF inflows accelerate, the gap could close in weeks rather than months. Saylor seems to understand this. His rebranding of MicroStrategy to simply "Strategy" last year was a signal that the company sees itself as a bitcoin accumulation vehicle first, everything else second. The $2.54 billion spent last week suggests that identity is no longer aspirational; it is operational.
Strategy's total bitcoin stash is now worth more than the GDP of Luxembourg.
