Michael Saylor has spent six years transforming Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, from an enterprise software company few outside the industry were watching into the world's largest corporate Bitcoin holder, amassing more than 762,000 BTC worth tens of billions of dollars.
Speaking at the Digital Asset Summit in New York today, Saylor talked about digital credit, which he framed as the defining opportunity of the current cycle. The flagship instrument is STRC, nicknamed "Stretch", is a preferred stock offering that Strategy has positioned as something unusual in crypto: a low-volatility, high-yield instrument designed to sit in a fixed-income portfolio. With a notional value of $5 billion and $224 million in average daily liquidity, it is already trading at institutional scale.
"Digital credit… is the most compelling credit instrument in the world," he told me after his talk. "If you can create something with a Sharpe ratio of four, it belongs in every portfolio."
Institutional capital has been returning to Bitcoin through regulated vehicles, with U.S. spot ETFs recording their longest inflow streak of the year. But despite that, less than 0.5% of U.S. advised wealth is allocated to crypto — a gap Saylor is trying to close. For investors seeking yield, a Bitcoin-collateralized instrument with bond-like volatility and double-digit returns is a different kind of conversation.
On stage, Saylor laid out the underlying framework through a three-layer stack. Digital equity absorbs the upside with high volatility. Digital capital sits in the middle. Digital credit — the flattest line on his chart — delivers structured yield with near-zero volatility, designed to hold stable while the Bitcoin base layer appreciates beneath it. A volatility comparison slide made the point visual: STRC came in lower than bonds, the S&P 500, gold, Microsoft, Google, and Bitcoin itself.
"STRC now has a leading Sharpe ratio," he said. "I don't know if it's the highest of every publicly traded security, but if it isn't, it's in the top 1%, if not the top 0.1%."
“STRC now has a leading Sharpe ratio,” he said in a conversation after his talk. “I don’t know if it’s the highest of any publicly traded security, but if it isn’t, it’s in the top 1%, if not the top 0.1%.”
Critics have questioned whether STRC’s yield is sustainable or whether it depends on continued Bitcoin price appreciation and Strategy’s ability to keep raising capital on favorable terms — a model that could become fragile in a downturn.
Saylor’s messaging has evolved well beyond Bitcoin’s price dynamics. The next phase, as he frames it, is financial engineering — building products that can compete with traditional credit instruments on their own terms.
“The future is full of uncertainty and challenges, but I believe humans will overcome them,” he said. “If you’re a pessimist, you assume change will hurt you; if you’re an optimist, you assume change will help you.”
His outlook remains consistently optimistic, even amid uncertainty. "I think the world is better than it has been at any time in human history. When have we had such an abundance of everything?" he added.