Strategy bought 4,603 bitcoin for $369.7 million between Aug. 24 and Aug. 30, ending a roughly 10-week pause in purchases and pushing the company’s total holdings to 845,050 BTC.
The filing, disclosed on Aug. 31 via an 8-K, showed an average acquisition price of $80,318 per coin including fees and expenses. It was the firm’s first confirmed purchase since June 22. With bitcoin trading near $77,000 at the time of publication, the latest batch sits roughly $3,000 per coin above current market prices.
Executive Chairman Michael Saylor signaled the return a day earlier with a short post on X reading “We’re back,” accompanied by the company’s familiar accumulation chart. The purchase is not large by Strategy’s historical standards. But it is large as a signal. After a summer spent selling coins and repairing the balance sheet, the original corporate bitcoin buyer is accumulating again in the $78,000-$80,000 zone.
How the Purchase Was Funded
Strategy raised $602.8 million by issuing 4,531,421 shares of Class A common stock through its at-the-market program during the week. That pool was split four ways: $369.7 million into bitcoin, $151.8 million to repurchase 1,557,177 shares of variable-rate STRC preferred stock, $50.7 million to cover STRC dividends, and roughly $30 million into the company’s USD Cash account.
The STRC repurchase reflects Strategy’s broader Digital Credit Capital Framework. The company has been buying STRC when it trades below its $100 stated amount, arguing that retiring preferred shares at a discount reduces future dividend obligations. Strategy had $364.8 million remaining under its digital-credit securities repurchase authorization after the latest transaction. An MSTR share repurchase authorization of $1 billion also remains unused.
That allocation is the more important capital-management development. Selling MSTR shares no longer automatically means that virtually all of the proceeds flow into bitcoin. Bitcoin now competes with preferred-stock repurchases, dividend obligations, and liquidity reserves for the proceeds of equity issuance. The model has evolved from a pure bitcoin-accumulation vehicle into something closer to a multi-purpose treasury operation that manages several capital streams simultaneously.
As of Aug. 30, Strategy reported $5.10 billion in its USD Reserve and $1.61 billion in USD Cash, totaling $6.71 billion of dollar assets. Net leverage stood at 0.0%. Saylor said USD duration, the measure of how long dollar assets can cover preferred dividends, rose 23 days to 4.0 years, and STRC’s bitcoin credit tightened by 3 basis points to 56.
Why Strategy Stopped and Why It Started Again
The 10-week pause was not a change of strategy. It was a balance-sheet cleanup. After common and preferred shares sold off hard in early summer, the company unveiled a turnaround plan at the end of June: buy back stock, sell some bitcoin, and build a dollar reserve so the treasury model was not one bad trading day away from a funding scare.
Between late June and Aug. 23, Strategy sold about 6,900 BTC for roughly $430 million, around $62,250 a coin. It issued tens of millions of MSTR shares, grew the dollar reserve from about $2.55 billion toward $5.1 billion, and created the $1.61 billion USD Cash pool. For several Sundays, Saylor did not post the weekly tracker. That silence was the tell.
The irony sits in the average prices. Strategy sold bitcoin in the low $62,000s and bought back in the low $80,000s, about 29% above the summer sale prints and roughly 6.5% above its long-run cost basis. That is the cost of waiting for a cleaner balance sheet while bitcoin put up its best August since 2017. The company is paying up to get back on offense, but it is doing it with net leverage at zero and enough dollars to cover preferred obligations for four years.
Portfolio and Market Context
At the current aggregate cost basis of $75,412 per coin, Strategy’s 845,050 BTC holdings are worth roughly $65 billion at current prices, a paper gain of about $1.3 billion. The total position represents over 4% of bitcoin’s 21 million supply cap.
Bitcoin’s price fell 1.5% to $77,395 on Sept. 2 as U.S.-Iran strikes reignited energy fears and rate hike expectations. Fed rate hike odds climbed to 64% ahead of the September FOMC meeting, adding pressure to risk assets including crypto. The broader crypto market declined alongside bitcoin, with ether down 2% and solana falling sharply.
Spot bitcoin ETFs recorded $236 million in net outflows on the first day of September, ending a nine-session inflow streak. BlackRock’s IBIT accounted for 85% of those outflows. But the institutional bid returned the following day with $217 million in net inflows, suggesting the September selloff may be brief.
Corporate bitcoin buyers are a small club and Strategy is the largest name in it. When that name went quiet for 10 weeks, the bid that desks treat as structural went missing. When it returns in the same week bitcoin is digesting a hawkish Jackson Hole speech and a $202 million ETF outflow day, the message is that $80,000 was not a level this particular buyer needed to fade.
The constructive read is still the one Saylor wanted. Holdings are 845,050 BTC. Dollar assets are $6.71 billion. Leverage is flat. The 10-week pause is over. After a month in which bitcoin ran from the low $60,000s to $81,000 and then settled near $78,000, the largest public treasury just endorsed that zone with $370 million of stock-sale proceeds.
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