Strategy's ability to keep buying Bitcoin has long depended on one thing: Access to capital. That financing engine is now facing its biggest test yet.
As Bitcoin fell back below $60,000 Thursday, Strategy's STRC preferred stock dropped to a new all-time low, raising fresh questions about whether the company can continue raising capital as efficiently as it has over the past two years.
The decline comes at a critical moment. Strategy has transformed itself from a software company into the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin in the world, funding much of that accumulation through an increasingly sophisticated mix of common equity, preferred securities, convertible debt and other financing vehicles.
Now, the concern isn't simply that Bitcoin is falling. It's that several of the mechanisms Strategy has relied on to buy more of it are coming under pressure at the same time.
For most of the past two years, Strategy's financing model has benefited from unusually favorable market conditions. Investors eagerly bought the company's preferred securities, allowing Strategy to issue billions of dollars of new capital and recycle the proceeds into additional Bitcoin purchases. At the same time, the company's common stock consistently traded at a premium that made equity issuance an attractive source of funding.
Both dynamics become more difficult during a market downturn. But according to Strategy CEO Phong Le, the answer is that the company has deliberately built far more flexibility into its balance sheet than many investors appreciate.
"The fact that we can sell equity, we can sell preferred, we can sell U.S. dollars, we can sell Bitcoin — we can buy all of those things too," Le told Coinage in a recent interview. "We can buy back convertible notes."
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Rather than relying on any single source of capital, Le says Strategy continuously evaluates every financing option available to it.
"We look at our equity and we look at our credit and the quality of both," Le said. "It's a pretty sophisticated detailed model. We run different scenarios on it, run simulations on it."
The market is now putting that process to the test.
Strategy's preferred shares STRC, which advertise an 11.5% semi-monthly dividend, were trading as low as $73.62 on Thursday — the farthest they have ever fallen from their intended par value of $100. Strategy's common stock, MSTR, had also cratered to lows not seen since early 2024.