Avik Roy: STRC and SATA Are Bitcoin’s Breakthrough into Stable Digital Credit

In a new interview with BitcoinTreasuries.net President Pete Rizzo, Avik Roy, chief strategy officer at Strive argues that Bitcoin treasury strategies may have finally found a scalable way to raise large amounts of capital – without diluting shareholders or relying on fragile market conditions.

At the center of that shift is Strategy’s STRC (“Stretch”), a preferred equity instrument he sees as a turning point in how Bitcoin exposure can be packaged for conservative investors.

Strategy’s path to this point has been gradual. The company previously relied on common stock issuance, zero-interest convertible debt during the low-rate era, and early preferred share structures. Those approaches helped fund Bitcoin accumulation but didn’t fully unlock demand from institutions seeking stability.

STRC, in Roy’s view, changes that by introducing a mechanism designed to keep the instrument anchored. “The design of Stretch is to be pegged at that $100 a share price,” he said, describing a structure intended to keep trading tightly around that level and limit downside volatility.

That stability is what potentially opens the door to a different class of investor. Rather than behaving like a typical equity, STRC is meant to function more like a cash alternative on a corporate balance sheet. As Roy put it, “If you’re a corporation, if you want to own something that’s like Treasury bonds where it’s your substitute for cash, this is the product.”

The implication is straightforward: if the peg holds, Bitcoin-linked instruments could begin competing directly with traditional cash equivalents.

The yield is a major part of that pitch. STRC currently offers a dividend yield in the low double digits, significantly higher than most short-term fixed-income options. Roy framed that gap bluntly: “That’s a lot better than you get from a stablecoin… a hell of a lot better than you get from Treasury bonds.”

The combination of high yield and engineered stability, he suggests, creates something new—an instrument that sits somewhere between equity, credit, and crypto.

He goes further, arguing that this could even reshape parts of the stablecoin debate. With regulators focused on creating frameworks for dollar-backed tokens, Roy questions whether those efforts risk missing a broader shift. “You’re fighting yesterday’s war,” he said, suggesting that preferred equity structures like STRC could ultimately deliver higher returns with comparable utility for investors.

At Strive, the approach is even more streamlined. Rather than issuing multiple layers of securities, the firm has centered its strategy around a single preferred instrument, SATA. “We don’t have convertible debt, we don’t have other preferreds, we just have this one instrument SATA,” Roy explained, emphasizing the simplicity of the structure. The goal is similar to STRC—a stable, income-generating vehicle—but with fewer moving parts and less exposure to the complexities of a layered capital stack.

Roy expects Strategy to move in a similar direction over time. As its outstanding convertible debt matures or is retired, the company could shift toward a simpler structure built primarily around common equity and STRC. “Strategy is going to start to look more like Strive over time,” he said, with STRC becoming the dominant way the company raises capital. Such a transition would reduce reliance on debt, limit arbitrage pressures tied to convertibles, and better align financing with Bitcoin’s long-term profile.

The broader opportunity, in Roy’s telling, lies in the scale of global fixed-income markets. “The bond market is several orders of magnitude larger than the stock market,” he noted, pointing out that most capital is managed with a strong preference for downside protection. Instruments like STRC are designed to meet that demand by offering a defined yield with limited volatility—while allowing issuers to retain upside exposure to Bitcoin.

Still, significant hurdles remain. Credit rating agencies, for example, have been slow to adapt their frameworks to Bitcoin-backed strategies. Roy criticized the current approach, arguing that treating Bitcoin as having no collateral value leads to overly conservative ratings. If that view changes, he believes the impact could be substantial, unlocking far larger pools of institutional capital.

For now, the model is still early. Roy compared the emergence of STRC to discovering a new source of financial energy: “You discover oil and the oil just gushes out.”

Whether that analogy proves accurate will depend on how these instruments perform under real market stress—particularly whether they can maintain their stability while continuing to offer outsized yields.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.