Michael Saylor Hints At Another Strategy Bitcoin Buy Even As DAT NAVs Collapse

Michael Saylor has hinted that Strategy, the largest Bitcoin treasury firm globally, will announce another BTC buy today.

“The most important orange dot is always the next,” Saylor wrote in a recent X post, which included a screenshot of the SaylorTracker chart. In the past, posts like these by Saylor have been followed with announcements of new Bitcoin purchases. This has led to speculation that another Strategy BTC buy could be announced soon. 

The continued Bitcoin accumulation by Strategy comes even as the net asset values (NAVs) for digital asset treasury (DAT) firms collapse.

Strategy Holds More Bitcoin Than The Top 15 BTC Treasury Firms

The chart in Saylor’s post shows that there have been 82 purchases by Strategy, with the firm’s total holdings standing at 640,250 BTC, worth around $69 billion at current prices. The company has also achieved an unrealized gain of 48.99% after purchasing the BTC at an average price of $74K per coin.

Top 20 corporate BTC holders (Source: Bitcoin Treasuries)

Strategy holds nearly 2.5% of BTC’s total supply of 21 million coins, more than the combined reserves of the top 15 public miners and corporate treasuries. The Bitcoin Treasuries data shows that these top 15 public companies collectively hold more than 900K BTC.

Crypto miner MARA Holdings is the second-biggest holder with 53,250 BTC on its balance sheet. Coming in at third is XXI with 43,514 BTC. 

Meanwhile, Japan-based Metaplanet, which is the largest corporate Bitcoin treasury in Asia, is the fourth-biggest BTC treasury in the world with 30,823 BTC. Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company rounds out the top five with 30,021 BTC. 

The rest of the top 15 corporate Bitcoin holders, which includes Riot Platforms, CleanSpark, Coinbase, and Tesla, hold smaller amounts of BTC.

DAT NAVs Collapse, Wiping Out Billions In Paper Wealth

While there was initial investor euphoria around DAT firms, the hype bubble around these companies has seemingly popped, according to 10x Research.

“The age of financial magic is ending for Bitcoin treasury companies,” said 10x Research analysts in a report last week. 

“They conjured billions in paper wealth by issuing shares far above their real Bitcoin value — until the illusion vanished,” the analysts added.

In the “financial magic trick,” the DAT firms managed to transfer wealth from retail investors who overpaid for the companies’ shares into actual Bitcoin for the firms. As such, shareholders have lost billions of dollars while executives have accumulated real BTC, the analysts said.

The analysts highlighted Metaplanet as an example. In their report, they said that the Asia-based firm transformed a market cap of $8 billion that was supported by just $1 billion in actual Bitcoin holdings into a $3.1 billion market cap company that holds $3.3 billion in BTC.

The pressure on DAT NAVs has led to Metaplanet temporarily suspending the exercise of its “20th to 22nd series” stock acquisition rights from about Oct. 20 to Nov. 17 as part of an effort to optimize its “capital raising strategies.”

Strategy itself experienced a similar “boom-and-bust cycle in its net asset value,” the analysts noted.

Looking at Strategy’s share price, the company’s stock has dropped over 13% in the past month, data from Google Finance shows.  

Strategy share price performance over the past month (Source: Google Finance)

The losses continued in the past week, with the company’s stock price dropping more than 5% during this period. However, Strategy’s share price did rise over 2% during Friday’s trading session.

The recent drop in Strategy’s stock price coincides with a slow down in the company’s Bitcoin purchases. Although Strategy seems to be continuing its BTC accumulation, the amount of coins bought with each of the recent purchases has been a lot smaller than the amounts seen with buys earlier this year.

Strategy’s last Bitcoin purchase was last week on Oct. 13, when the firm bought 220 BTC. Prior to this recent purchase, the company also bought 196 BTC on Sept. 29 and 850 BTC on Sept. 22. 

Those purchase amounts are substantially smaller than the 1,955 BTC bought on Sept. 8, or the 21,021 BTC and the 10,100 BTC bought on July 29 and June 16, respectively.