Strategy Crosses 815,000 BTC as Markets Navigate Iran Fears and a Quantum Reckoning

he company now holds 815,061 Bitcoin, acquired at a cumulative cost of $61.56 billion. The announcement landed at the intersection of three converging narratives shaping the digital asset market this week: a surge in institutional Bitcoin demand, renewed geopolitical risk from an unravelling US-Iran ceasefire, and an increasingly fractious debate over quantum computing and the future of Bitcoin’s cryptographic foundations.

Strategy’s STRC engine hits new records

The latest purchase was executed at an average price of $74,395 per coin, marginally below the company’s overall average acquisition cost of $75,527, according to an 8-K filing submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. The buy ranks behind only the 55,500 BTC and 51,780 BTC tranches acquired in November 2024 by coin count, underscoring the scale and consistency of Strategy’s approach to building what it has positioned as the world’s preeminent corporate Bitcoin treasury.

Saylor buys a huge stash of Bitcoin, source: X

Funding the acquisition leaned heavily on Stretch — the company’s perpetual preferred security, traded under the ticker STRC — which generated $2.18 billion, or approximately 85.7% of total proceeds. Sales of Class A common stock contributed the remaining $366 million. The mechanics of the STRC instrument set new internal benchmarks during the week. On 13 April, the security logged an estimated daily record of approximately 7,741 BTC in associated purchasing activity, driven by the sale of 11.9 million shares through its at-the-market programme and generating more than $1 billion in single-day trading volume. The following day saw an estimated 9,364 BTC tied to 14.4 million shares, bringing the two-day combined total to an estimated 17,204 BTC — a 518% surge versus the preceding four-week average, according to tracking service STRC Live.

Strategy co-founder Saylor had telegraphed the purchase on Sunday ahead of the formal announcement, a pattern the company has adopted with increasing regularity. On Friday, the company also disclosed plans to pay STRC dividends on a semi-monthly basis. “If we were to move forward with paying STRC semi-monthly, we would be in category one, the only preferred in the world that pays semi-monthly dividends,” chief executive Phong Le said. “We think this is unique and attractive.”

The purchase confirms that Strategy, which rebranded from MicroStrategy in early 2025 to reflect its Bitcoin-first identity, has not only met but already exceeded the market’s expectations. As recently as February, prediction markets on Polymarket had the company reaching 800,000 BTC by year-end — a target it has now surpassed with more than eight months remaining.

Geopolitical crosswinds and the $81,000 ceiling

Bitcoin managed a green weekly close despite pressure from the sudden re-escalation of the US-Iran conflict late in the session. WTI crude oil surged more than 7% and briefly traded above $89 per barrel after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and denied reports of a second round of diplomatic talks. The cryptocurrency is trading at approximately $76,000 as the new week begins, up sharply from the lows seen at the height of the ceasefire collapse, though it remains pinned below a cluster of technically significant resistance levels.

Bitcoin climbed above $76,000, source: BNC

The nearest of these is the 21-week exponential moving average at $78,400 — a level analyst Rekt Capital described last week as an active rejection point, warning that a weekly close beneath it could set up a post-breakout retest of the double-bottom formation top near $73,000. Trader Michaël van de Poppe took a more constructive view, pointing to an unfilled gap in CME Group’s Bitcoin futures market just above spot. “Bitcoin bouncing upwards, and given that there’s still a gap to $77.3K, I would assume we’re going to see new highs this week,” van de Poppe told his X followers on Monday.

The more significant resistance sits at $81,000 — the average cost basis for US spot Bitcoin ETF holders, a level that crypto market intelligence firm Decode has characterised as Bitcoin’s “final boss” in its latest Elliott Wave analysis. Short-term holders, those who have held for up to six months without selling, carry a cost basis of approximately $83,500, per data from CryptoQuant. The spent output profit ratio for that cohort is hovering near breakeven. “If SOPR manages to sustainably move back above 1, it would indicate that STHs are once again realising profits, which is generally positive for the market as long as values do not become excessive,” CryptoQuant contributor Darkfost wrote last week.

The ETF flows picture provided grounds for cautious optimism. US spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded net inflows of more than 25,000 BTC over the five trading days ending Friday — their highest weekly total since April 2025 — including more than $660 million in net inflows on Friday alone, the largest single-day figure since January, according to data from Farside Investors. Andre Dragosch, European head of research at Bitwise, noted on X that despite the scale of these inflows, Bitcoin has yet to reclaim the $81,000 ETF cost basis, increasing the psychological weight of that level as resistance.

Onchain analytics platform Glassnode offered a sobering longer-term read. Lead analyst CryptoVizArt, using the firm’s true market mean — a cost basis metric that strips out dormant and likely lost coins — noted that Bitcoin has been trading below the average active investor’s entry point for more than 75 consecutive days, with the metric itself sitting at $78,200. The current episode tracks a “milder path” than the bear markets of 2018 and 2022. “The signal isn’t ‘all clear’ — it’s ‘watch closely,'” CryptoVizArt wrote.

Adam Back, quantum computing, and the Satoshi question

The week’s most pointed technical debate unfolded not in the trading pits but at Paris Blockchain Week, where Adam Back, chief executive of Bitcoin infrastructure company Blockstream and — following a New York Times investigation by journalist John Carreyrou — the most publicly scrutinised candidate for the identity of Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, argued forcefully for optional, backwards-compatible quantum-resistant upgrades to Bitcoin’s cryptographic foundations.

Back, who has consistently and categorically denied being Nakamoto, told conference attendees that current quantum computers remain “essentially lab experiments” with progress that has been incremental rather than transformative, and that a machine capable of threatening Bitcoin’s elliptic curve signatures is at least two decades away. His preferred approach: begin building quantum-resistant upgrade pathways now, rather than react to a crisis later. “Preparation is key. Making changes in a controlled manner is much safer than reacting in a crisis,” Back said. He pointed to Blockstream’s work testing hash-based quantum-resistant transaction signatures on the Liquid Network layer-2 as evidence that the groundwork can be laid without disrupting the main chain.

His comments landed in the middle of a live and increasingly acrimonious debate triggered by BIP-361, a proposal published on 14 April by Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp and five co-authors, which would phase out quantum-vulnerable addresses on a fixed five-year timeline and freeze coins that fail to migrate. That freeze would encompass an estimated 6.9 million BTC exposed to quantum-vulnerable addresses — including approximately 1 million BTC attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto and a further 5.6 million coins that have not moved in over a decade. The reaction was immediate. Developer Mark Erhardt branded the proposal “authoritarian and confiscatory,” while Metaplanet’s Phil Geiger distilled the apparent contradiction in a single line: “We have to steal people’s money to prevent their money from being stolen.”

The urgency underlying the debate, even among those who reject the freeze mechanism, is not purely hypothetical. As BNC reported in March, the past twelve months have produced an unprecedented concentration of quantum computing advances. Google’s Quantum AI division recently reduced prior estimates of the physical qubit count required to break Bitcoin’s elliptic curve cryptography by a factor of twenty, to fewer than 500,000. Researchers at Caltech have suggested a cryptographically relevant machine could arrive before 2030, though estimates across the field vary widely. The core risk, as BNC has previously outlined, is not whether the threat is imminent — it is that Bitcoin upgrades require years of global coordination to implement, while hardware progress can be nonlinear and difficult to forecast.

I am not Satoshi said Back via X

Back acknowledged the Nakamoto dimension himself. In a second Paris Blockchain Week session, he noted that a post-quantum migration could inadvertently clarify the true size of Satoshi’s accessible holdings — an observation that carries particular resonance given the NYT investigation’s conclusions. Carreyrou, who spent 18 months on the piece, told the Times’ Daily podcast he is between 99.5% and 100% certain he has identified Bitcoin’s creator. Back, for his part, has repeated his denial through multiple formats. “I think the most probable situation is that Satoshi is somebody who’s not talking to documentary film crews, to investigative journalists, who is not participating in the forums or at conferences with his real name,” he told Yahoo Finance last week. Neither the market nor the protocol appears to be waiting for an answer.