Strategy Hasn't Bought Bitcoin In Two Months, and Bitcoin Doesn't Care
Bitcoin traded near $79,000 this week and touched $81,000 overnight. That move happened without the one buyer the market has trained itself to expect every Monday morning: Strategy.
For years, Michael Saylor's company was treated as the single biggest force behind bitcoin's price. Now it has gone roughly two months without adding a single coin, and bitcoin is having one of its best stretches in over a year anyway.
THE FILING THAT CHANGED NOTHING AND EVERYTHING
On Aug. 23, Strategy filed an update on its capital moves. The company designated a separate USD Cash pool that it may deploy for bitcoin purchases, preferred dividends, debt interest, share buybacks or paying down convertible notes. Strategy's bitcoin holdings remained at 840,447 BTC, worth around $65.8 billion, bought at an average price of $75,385 per bitcoin.
No bitcoin bought. No bitcoin sold. Instead, the company raised its USD Reserve and built a fresh cash cushion, funded by selling more MSTR common stock. Strategy's holdings are still equivalent to around 4% of bitcoin's 21 million supply cap.
TWO MONTHS OF SILENCE
This is not a one-week pause. Strategy co-founder and Executive Chairman Michael Saylor has refrained from posting his usual Strategy bitcoin tracker chart update in recent weeks. The weekly orange-dot, green-dot ritual that defined this bull market simply stopped, and nobody at the company has said when it resumes.
For a stock that gets called a leveraged bitcoin play, MSTR has still moved with bitcoin's rally this week even without a single purchase behind it. That alone breaks the assumption that Strategy's buying is what pushes the price around.
THE CREDIT RATING PROBLEM
Strategy's cash-building push lines up with a credibility problem it has been trying to fix since last October. S&P Global assigned the company its first-ever rating for a bitcoin treasury company, and it landed deep in junk territory. S&P Global gave Strategy a B- credit rating, citing high financial risk from its bitcoin-heavy business model and limited dollar liquidity.
Building a multi-year USD reserve and pushing its STRC preferred stock back toward par value are the kinds of moves a company makes when it wants a better grade from the rating agencies and, eventually, a shot at index inclusion. Whether that campaign works is a separate question from who is actually moving bitcoin's price right now.
SOMEONE ELSE IS BUYING
With Strategy sidelined, the running theory on Simply Bitcoin's show is that whales, ETF buyers, and possibly other nation-states or corporations are absorbing supply that used to come from one predictable source. There is also a stranger data point in the mix: Jane Street, the trading firm that bitcoiners have long suspected of running price-suppressing algorithms around the U.S. market open, just had its worst month on record.
Jane Street posted roughly $15 billion of losses in July, its first monthly slump in about a decade, as AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness swooned and dragged down asset prices across equity markets. The disclosed cause was an AI hedge fund bet gone wrong, not bitcoin trading, so any link to bitcoin's stabilization is speculation on the show's part rather than a confirmed connection.
What is confirmed is simpler: the company that was supposed to be bitcoin's buyer of last resort has been out of the market for two months, and the price went up anyway.
This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.
