In brief

• Strategy CEO Phong Le said the company will resume buying Bitcoin once its Stretch (STRC) preferred shares return to their $100 par value, allowing it to issue more of the stock profitably.
• The firm has paused purchases since late June and raised $467 million in common stock to build a $3 billion cash reserve, enough to cover two years of dividends.
• Le said the company would have to "consider some of the risk associated with our debt" if BTC were to fall to the $8,000 to $10,000 range.

Bitcoin treasury firm Strategy will start buying the cryptocurrency again once its preferred shares recover, CEO Phong Le said, as the company leans on a retooled financing model to ride out the crypto downturn.

Speaking to Bloomberg TV on Tuesday, Le said the plan is to get the firm's preferred shares—known as Stretch (STRC)—back to their $100 par value. "When Stretch gets back to par, we'll issue more. We'll buy Bitcoin. We may continue to beef up our U.S. dollar reserve," he said, while conceding that he's "unsure" how long that will take. Issuing more of the preferred stock is "a big part of our capital plan," he added, "because it's very accretive to our Bitcoin per share, which is accretive to our shareholders."

The company hasn't bought Bitcoin since late June. Instead, it has spent recent weeks building cash, raising $467 million through a common-stock sale to lift its reserve to $3 billion—enough to cover two years of dividend payments. Le cast the move as part of a broader shift, arguing that the firm is evolving "from being a Bitcoin treasury company to a full digital capital platform."

Getting Stretch back to par

STRC has traded below its $100 par since mid-May, changing hands around $89 on Wednesday. Below par, selling new preferred shares to raise money becomes unattractive, which is why restoring the price matters so much to Strategy's plans. Le said building up a U.S. dollar reserve is the main lever. "We've learned over the course of the last couple months that having that liquid access to U.S. dollar capital, whether it be one, two, three years, is quite important," he said, adding that as the reserve grew over recent weeks, the shares had climbed "from a low in the $75 range to close to $90."

'We're not going anywhere'

Le pushed back on fears that Strategy is retreating as Bitcoin's dominant buyer. "We're not going anywhere," he said. "Anybody that's worried about Strategy shouldn't be," pointing to its position as the largest identified holder with more than 840,000 BTC—some 4% of the 21 million that will ever exist—in its coffers. "Bitcoin's a lot bigger than us," he added, noting the asset trades $30 billion to $40 billion a day, and that the firm's $216 million in recent sales "did not move the market."

Those sales, which began when co-founder Michael Saylor started trimming the firm's $54 billion stack last month, had stoked concern about the durability of the debt-and-equity flywheel he built in 2020. Standard Chartered analysts recently played down the moves as "mostly noise," after Strategy unveiled a capital framework two weeks ago giving management more room to sell Bitcoin, buy back securities and protect liquidity.

The CEO also brushed off a Bloomberg report that distressed funds were in talks to swap their STRC holdings, saying the firm hasn't had "any material conversations" about it.

The downside math

Asked about a worst-case scenario, Le pointed to levels far below the roughly $64,700 Bitcoin fetched at the time of the interview. "When Bitcoin gets down closer to $8,000 to $10,000 is when we're going to have to consider some of the risk associated with our debt," he said, adding that, "Until that point in time, we feel very secure about the balance sheet." Bitcoin’s current slump is business as usual, he argued, saying that, "We've been through this in 2022. We're going through it in 2026, and I'm pretty excited about the next bull market of Bitcoin."

For now, Strategy’s Bitcoin buys are still on pause. The firm’s MSTR stock is down more than 77% over the past year and Bitcoin has slid 45% in the same time frame, with the cryptocurrency trading at around half its all-time high set in October—leaving the preferred-share engine that funds Strategy's purchases stuck below the level Le needs to restart it.

On prediction market Myriad, owned by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, users place just a 13% chance on Strategy holding over 1 million BTC before 2027, with less than half the year left and the firm needing to buy more than 150,000 BTC to hit the milestone.