Is MicroStrategy finally going to sell BTC?

This time, it's not just market speculation. On May 5, 2026, Strategy released its Q1 report. In the official press release, it disclosed that it held 818,300 BTC, approximately 3.9% of the total Bitcoin supply, and had raised $11.68 billion this year. STRC raised $5.58 billion this year, and its preferred stock had paid out approximately $693 million in dividends. The more crucial sentence is hidden later. In its KPI risk statement, Strategy acknowledged that if convertible bonds mature or certain instruments need to be redeemed, the company may need to sell common stock or BTC to raise cash. During the earnings call, Saylor was even more direct: The company is likely to sell some BTC to pay dividends, partly to "vaccinate" the market and let everyone know this can happen. CEO Phong Le added fuel to the fire: the company will sell BTC when it's in its best interest, not just sit there saying "never sell." Consequently, on Polymarket, the probability of "MicroStrategy selling any BTC by December 31, 2026" reached approximately 40%. What truly shocked the market wasn't how many coins Strategy would sell. The myth of "never selling" has finally been dismantled by the company itself. The strongest believers are starting to teach the market to accept selling BTC. For the past few years, MicroStrategy's most valuable asset wasn't its software business, nor just its BTC holdings, but a simple, even brutal, story: We buy, we borrow to buy, we issue shares to buy, we will never sell. This story worked incredibly well. It transformed an enterprise analytics software company into the most wildly traded Bitcoin leveraged stock on the US stock market. In 2025, the company simply changed its name to Strategy, no longer bothering to conceal its identity. It no longer acted as a "software company holding BTC," but directly defined itself as the world's first and largest Bitcoin Treasury Company. In simpler terms, it's a financial machine revolving around a BTC balance sheet. This machine now has three layers. At the very bottom, there are 818,300 BTC. Official disclosures indicate that as of May 3, 2026, the original cost of these coins was approximately $61.81 billion, with a market capitalization of approximately $64.14 billion, and an average purchase price of approximately $75,500. The middle layer consists of the still-existing software business. First-quarter revenue was $124 million, a year-on-year increase of 11.9%. This amount seems small compared to the over $60 billion worth of BTC, but it provides Strategy with the shell of an "operating company" and also leaves room for regulatory narratives. At the top layer are increasingly complex financing tools: common stock MSTR, preferred stock STRC, STRF, STRK, STRD, and previously issued convertible bonds. Strategy doesn't just buy cryptocurrency; it packages BTC into various yield, volatility, and credit products, selling them to different types of funds. Therefore, this statement about selling BTC isn't a collapse of faith. It's more like an update to the product manual.

STRC is the real protagonist of this shift

Many people are focusing on the words "Sell BT C" in Saylor's announcement, but what truly forced the company to change its narrative is STRC.

This is Strategy's most successful digital credit product this year. Officially, they say STRC reached $8.5 billion in size within 9 months, raised $5.58 billion this year, achieved a daily trading volume of $375 million, and kept volatility down to 3%. Saylor even claims it has become one of the world's largest preferred stocks by market capitalization.

The problem lies here. Preferred stock isn't free money. STRC currently offers an annualized dividend yield of approximately 11.5%, and the company has proposed increasing the payment frequency from once a month to twice a month. While this sounds smoother, it actually pushes Strategy from the "just be bullish on BTC in the long run" story to a more realistic scenario: it must continuously generate cash. In the past, Saylor's favorite move was issuing MSTR to buy BTC. This was comfortable when the stock price had a premium. Issuing stock didn't immediately bring in fixed interest but also boosted the BTC per share metric. However, if the premium for MSTR isn't high enough, continuing to issue shares will only make things look worse. For ordinary shareholders, this isn't accretion, it's dilution. Selling a small portion of the already appreciated BTC to pay preferred stock dividends might actually look better than issuing shares at a low price. This is the new logic Strategy wants to convey to the market: It's not that they won't sell, but that they want to sell in a way that "increases the value of each BTC share." Book losses are the noise of this machine. The most frightening number in the first quarter report is the loss. Strategy reported an operating loss of $14.47 billion in the first quarter, of which $14.46 billion came from unrealized losses on the fair value of BTC; the net loss was $12.54 billion, or $38.25 per diluted share. For a traditional company, this figure would be enough to warrant a funeral. But for Strategy, it's more like accounting noise. Since adopting FASB ASU 2023-08, every quarter-end fluctuation in BTC price directly impacts the profit and loss statement. A price drop results in huge losses; a price rebound recovers unrealized gains. Saylor doesn't care much about this profit and loss statement. He prefers the market to look at BTC per share. Official data shows that the BTC Yield is 9.4% year-to-date, BTC Gain is 63,400 BTC, and BTC USD revenue is approximately $4.97 billion. The story the company really wants to tell is: the amount of BTC behind each ordinary shareholder's share is still increasing. This is why selling BTC becomes a delicate matter. If selling BTC causes the price of each BTC share to decrease, that's a failure; if it's merely to maintain the credit instrument in exchange for lower-cost, larger-scale financing, and the company as a whole remains a net buyer of BTC, then Saylor would say it's financial engineering, not surrender. That sounds sophisticated. And it's also dangerous. What the market fears is not being misunderstood. Strategy currently holds nearly 4% of the total BTC supply. Any move it makes is closely watched by the market. Therefore, Saylor's comment about "vaccinating" is interesting. He's not hiding from selling, but rather trying to normalize the situation in advance. Selling a little first tells the market: See, it hasn't collapsed. Later, when selling is needed, there will be less panic. This is proactive management of public opinion, and also a training of traders' nerves. But the market may not cooperate. In a bull market, Strategy selling some BTC to pay dividends can be interpreted as mature asset and liability management. In a time of fragile liquidity, the same action will be interpreted differently by algorithms and leveraged funds: Even Saylor has started selling. Polymarket's 40% probability reflects this psychology. It doesn't necessarily represent real selling pressure, but it means the fuse for the "buy only, don't sell" narrative has been pulled. What's more complicated is that the more tools Strategy has, the higher the cost of explanation. Ordinary investors buy "MSTR equals leveraged BTC." But the company is now selling a much more complex system: BTC reserves, preferred stock dividends, common stock premium, cash reserves, accounting losses, and BTC per share. The belief story is only one sentence long. The financial engineering takes half an hour to explain. In summary, Strategy will continue to buy BTC; this doesn't seem to be changing now. The official narrative remains that of a net aggregator, and the goal remains increasing the value of each BTC share. However, it's no longer the simple HODL totem. It's more like a private Bitcoin bank that uses BTC as collateral, the US stock market as a financing channel, and sells yields to fixed-income funds through preferred stock. Instead of locking BTC in cold wallets for ten years, it puts BTC on a balance sheet, repeatedly mortgaging, financing, valuing, and interpreting it, then processing the volatility into new financial products. This is certainly clever. Clever enough to be unsettling. This machine only seems perfect under one condition: BTC experiences a long-term upward trend, the funding market remains open, and investors are willing to believe in this new metric of BTC per share. If all three conditions are met, Saylor might truly have transformed a software company into the Berkshire Hathaway of the BTC era. If one of these conditions fails, the market will rediscover an old truth: faith can be interest-free, but preferred stock will. MicroStrategy hasn't betrayed Bitcoin. It has simply finally acknowledged that Bitcoin also has to pay.