Grayscale Research head Zach Pandl said Bitcoin needs fresh buyers to establish a durable floor after Strategy’s first token sale in nearly three years exposed limits on the company’s ability to keep accumulating at current share prices.
In a note published Thursday, Pandl argued that Strategy’s leveraged model has become a source of strain for the wider market rather than the dependable bid beneath it. The company disclosed earlier in the week that it sold 32 BTC for roughly $2.5 million at an average price of $77,135, trimming its holdings to 843,706 BTC and breaking a stance against selling that had held since December 2022.
Pandl called the sale small against the total position, but said the shift in treasury management weighed on sentiment already unsettled by geopolitical uncertainty. Traders had spent weeks pricing in high odds that Strategy would part with some Bitcoin before year end, and confirmation removed the guarantee that had underpinned how the market read its balance sheet.
Strategy’s Funding Channels Tighten As STRC Slips Below Par
The pressure traces back to Strategy’s variable-rate perpetual preferred stock, Stretch, which trades as STRC and was designed to hold near $100 a share while paying an 11.5% dividend. With the stock around $95.42 and total notional near $10.5 billion, a price below par forces the company to raise its dividend, deepening cash flow obligations tied to a Bitcoin-backed balance sheet.
Those obligations matter because STRC has carried the bulk of recent buying. The company leaned on it to fund a roughly $2 billion Bitcoin purchase through at-the-market sales of preferred and common stock, a structure that works only while both tickers hold value. Lower STRC and MSTR prices narrow Strategy’s room to add tokens.
Pandl wrote
“Strategy’s levered business model is under pressure, and this has increased the volatility for the BTC market as a whole. We think that Strategy, which historically has been a net buyer of BTC, will have a limited ability to accumulate more tokens at current share prices for both STRC and MSTR.”
Grayscale Sees a Healthier Bitcoin Market As Ownership Diversifies
Pandl framed the path to a floor around new participants, writing that other buyers will need to step in for Bitcoin’s price to find a sustainable bottom.
Grayscale still views the longer arc as constructive, arguing that less Bitcoin on leveraged treasury balance sheets and more across diversified corporate treasuries would support resilience over time. That cuts against years in which a single leveraged proxy concentrated exposure into an engineered feedback loop. Grayscale expects Bitcoin to recover in the coming months, while cautioning it may lag segments benefiting from near-term regulatory clarity.
