Strategy Buys 535 Bitcoin Almost Entirely with Common Stock as STRC Demand Slows

After a week-long pause in accumulation, Michael Saylor's Strategy is back to buying Bitcoin, but the return has been a slow one. Today, the company announced it had acquired an additional 535 BTC, with the vast majority of the purchase funded through its Class A common stock (MSTR) rather than its flagship preferred stock vehicle.

Just 0.23% of the buy, roughly 1.24 BTC, was funded by Strategy's Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock (STRC). The remaining 533.76 BTC was acquired with proceeds from MSTR common stock sales under the company's at-the-market program. The lean on common stock marks a notable shift from the playbook Saylor has been publicly championing in recent months, in which he has signaled the company's intent to move away from relying on MSTR itself as the primary funding mechanism for Bitcoin purchases, and instead lean more heavily on STRC as the dominant capital-raising tool.

That transition, however, is running into softer demand this month. STRC demand throughout the current cycle has been markedly weaker than the explosive run seen last month, when back-to-back record-breaking days saw the preferred stock raise over $1.57 billion in a single session and fund the purchase of roughly 14,834 Bitcoin on April 14 alone. By contrast, STRC took more than a week longer than usual to return to its $100 par value this month, a key threshold that signals when the variable rate mechanism enables Strategy to issue fresh shares at full face value.

STRC did finally hit par again in pre-market trading earlier today, and as of writing has accumulated an estimated 431 Bitcoin. With the ex-dividend date for this month's payout now just days away, the question is whether the typical pre-ex-dividend volume spike, a pattern that has held consistently across the past eight months, will deliver enough capital to meaningfully accelerate the buying pace. While an uptick in demand is expected this week as institutional buyers move to lock in the monthly dividend, it does not appear likely that STRC will replicate the multi-billion dollar surge it produced in April.

With today's purchase, Strategy now controls an estimated 818,869 BTC, extending its lead as the largest corporate Bitcoin holder by a wide margin. Its position is more than 18 times the size of the #2 public holder, Twenty One Capital, which holds 43,514 BTC.

The company has also reiterated that crossing the 1 million BTC threshold this year remains within reach. The math supports the ambition: Strategy has acquired approximately 146,372 BTC year-to-date in 2026, having entered the year with 672,497 BTC at the end of December 2025. To hit the 1 million mark, the company would need to add roughly another 181,131 BTC over the remaining seven and a half months, which works out to about 24,151 BTC per month, a pace it has demonstrated it can sustain when both STRC and MSTR ATM programs fire in tandem.

Strategy retains substantial dry powder, with more than $19.46 billion still available under the STRC at-the-market program alone, along with capacity across STRD, STRF, STRK, and MSTR. Whether this week's ex-dividend catalyst is enough to revive STRC's multi-billion-dollar buying days, or whether Strategy will continue to lean more heavily on common stock in the near term, remains to be seen.