MicroStrategy被迫卖币：优先股股息压力与融资失效

In February 2025, with Bitcoin sliding under $85,000, Michael Sailor posted a line that became scripture for many diehard Bitcoin holders out there. Sell a kidney if you must, but keep the Bitcoin. Well, fast forward to today and it appears his own company has ran out of kidneys because they are selling thousands of Bitcoin. Now, the heated argument you'll find everywhere on X about whether he ever really meant what he said is the wrong argument because what sailor once stopped mattering months ago.

Strategy currently holds a little over $840,000 BTC. But sitting on the other side of that pile is an obligation that arrives every single month in dollars whether Bitcoin is at $126,000 or at $63,000. It doesn't negotiate. It doesn't take a view on the 4-year cycle. and it does not care about conviction. The main reason this matters so much beyond just one company is that roughly 200 public companies now hold over 1.2 million Bitcoin between them and a lot of them built the exact same thing with the same kind of obligation.

So today we're going to break down what turned Sailor into a forced seller, why the funding machine that used to pay for it stopped working, and how the entire digital asset treasury category is changing forever. My name is DC and this is the Coin Bureau. So, let's start with the thing that actually drives all of this because it isn't depth in the way many are interpreting it. Strategy has five publicly traded securities sitting above its common stock MSTR.

There's Strike, Strife, Stride, Stretch, and a Eurodenominated one called Stream, listed in Luxembourg. Most of these are what is known as perpetual preferred. And if that phrase means nothing to you, don't worry. You're not alone. A perpetual preferred is a security that pays you cash forever. It never matures, so the company never gets a date where the obligation ends. Most of them don't convert into stock, so it never turns into equity, just pays and pays and pays.

Strike carries an 8% dividend. Strife and Stride carry 10%. And then there's Stretch, which is the one getting so much attention. Stretch or STRC launched in July 2025 at a 9% rate, raising roughly $2.47 for $7 billion with a $100 par value and a promise that it would trade around par. Stretch has a ratchet built into it, meaning when the price sags below $95, the dividend rate steps up in half% increments to pull buyers back in.

Each one of those steps adds an estimated $53 million to the annual bill. So that's $53 million every time the market says no. By July of this year, that 9% had climbed to 12% and payments moved from monthly to semionthly. The thing to bear in mind here is that this is supposed to be a one-way system. Management has said it will not lower the rate until stretch demonstrates sustained healthy trading near $100 a share.

So, the ratchet goes up and comes down only on good behavior. However, recent reporting suggests the board moved in June to make any further increases discretionary rather than automatic. So quite how one way this mechanism still is is a bit disputed. And what's more, it isn't even working. On the 31st of July, Stretch closed at around $89, 11% below the par value it was designed to hug. But that is just noise unless we look a bit closer at the business.

In the second quarter of this year, Strategy paid $400 million in preferred dividends. In that same quarter, the software side of strategy, the actual company with actual customers, generated $122 million in revenue. The dividend bill was more than three times the entire top line. That $122 million is revenue, not profit. Annualized, the preferred and interest obligations run somewhere between 1.2 billion and $1.7 billion, depending on what you count.

A year earlier, the preferred dividend line was $49 million a quarter. So it grew roughly eightfold in just 12 months. A fixed cash bill denominated in dollars sitting on top of an asset that seems to do whatever it likes. So you might be wondering if that bill was always going to exist, what used to pay it? Well, strategy stock used to trade at a hefty premium to the Bitcoin on its balance sheet. That's the MNAF, the ratio of market value to the value of the underlying coins.

And at the 2021 peak, it hit six times during the late 2024 mania over three. So, the company issued new shares at that inflated price, bought Bitcoin with the proceeds, and every existing shareholder ended up owning more Bitcoin per share than they did the day before. This is dilution that effectively made everyone richer, at least while things were trending up, and it worked for years. Over the past eight quarters, the company increased its share count by around 74%.

This year alone, it raised more than $17 billion by selling new shares. But there's a threshold that determines just how much strategy can rely on this supposedly infinite money glitch. Above net asset value, issuing stock creates value for existing holders. Below it, issuing stock destroys it. So there is no in between and no amount of conviction can change that reality. On a basic reading, market cap divided by the value of the coins.

Strategies MNAV is now roughly 68. That's from 2x as recently as 2 years ago. Now the company's numbers will tell you that MNAV is slightly above one and it is technically right because its own formula holds stepped and preference stock in at face value rather than market value which inflates the result and in July strategy redefined the metric entirely with its glossery now stating that any amnav calculated before the 23rd of July isn't comparable to the new one.

So the chart that justified the entire premium has been retired. So, let's look at something interesting here. In the August 2025 earnings tech, the company made a promise. It would not issue MSTR below 2.5 times MNAV except to pay interest and dividends. Since that slide, it has sold 14.3 billion of stock, all of it below that line. And management has acknowledged it needs to be above roughly 1.22 times before issuance is accretive again.

So, the funding source rotates. When the market stops handing you free money for your premium, the only asset left to fund the coupon is the treasury. Bitcoin is being sold to pay the preferred holders their cash. And Bitcoin is also being sold to buy back the preferred themselves, defending the price so the ratchet doesn't trigger again. In June, the board authorized a $1 billion repurchase program across the preferred stack.

So, coins leave the balance sheet to prop up the securities that exist to buy coins. As awkward as it sounds, that's how it works. But that gives us something specific to watch out for when interpreting Strategy's announcement on how it's allocating capital. So, watch out for Strategy selling Bitcoin and issuing equity in the same reporting week. So, if a company is a net buyer with a healthy funding channel, those two things shouldn't be happening together.

When they do, it's telling us that the Treasury is being used as a working capital account. But of course, keeping up with weekly AKs and making sense of three different definitions of the same ratio, that's a full-time job. Most people simply don't have time to research all of that. So, we made it a lot easier. Right here on YouTube, you can join the Coin Bureau Club light plan. You'll get daily market updates across both crypto and traders read on the best opportunities out there, and curated updates with only the detail that's actually important.

Just tap the join button below this video to get started. Okay, back to the filings. As I record this, the most recent disclosure saw Strategy sell 1,638 BTC at an average price of just under 64K for about $105 million. Of that, $52 million went to preferred dividend distributions. Another $52 million went to buying back stretch shares. So, the proceeds split almost exactly in half between paying the coupon and defending the coupon.

In the same week, the company sold over 3 mi