Michael Saylor’s Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) has sold 3,588 BTC for $216 million. His average sale price was approximately $60,200 per BTC net of fees, far below the company’s cost basis of nearly $75,700 for its stack of coins prior to this sale.
After years of vowing, “We’re not sellers. We’re only acquiring and holding BTC,” he sold after a 52% drawdown from BTC’s high in October 2025 and a 20% drawdown from Strategy’s own cost basis.
The character arc is familiar to countless crypto traders who have taken on too much leverage buying high, eventually forcing them to unwind their margined positions as prices crash.
Indeed, Strategy has bought BTC at progressively higher prices since 2020, waiting nearly six years for its first major sale.
The sale arrived after the price of BTC halved yet the company had cash deadlines for dividends on all series of its preferred shares.
Saylor spent years insisting this moment would never come.
He posted, “Never sell your BTC.” He also told followers, “Sell a kidney if you must, but keep the BTC.”
His social media profile is an endless stream of never-sell declarations. Protos has previously catalogued these.
Last week, he started unwinding his corporate position in size.
Read more: Strategy authorizes massive BTC sale after 52-week lows
It all came toppling down
The sale contradicts one of Saylor’s most repeated, inaccurate predictions. He’s long assumed BTC would compound at an average 30% annual rate. For over five years, however, it hasn’t.
His inaccurate BTC price projection was the basis of Strategy’s pivot from operating a software business to amassing financial leverage.
It was also akin to a load-bearing wall that only holds in fair weather.
If BTC were to have averaged a 30% rally per year, it certainly would have made sense to pay annualized costs at or below 12% to acquire more BTC, even after paying for salaries and other professional fees.
Indeed, all of Strategy’s debt coupons and dividends annualize at 12% or less.
However, BTC hasn’t even rallied above Strategy’s cost basis, let alone 30% per year.
Strategy framed the sale as a way to fund dividends on its so-called “Digital Credit,” which isn’t actually a credit instrument but an assortment of stocks.
As opposed to a real credit instruments with mandatory interest payments, Saylor calls stocks with voluntary and mostly variable dividends declared at the sole discretion of his board of directors “Digital Credit.”
The phrase dresses up Strategy’s elaborate fiat payout obligations, which don’t pause when BTC declines in price.
‘We’re only acquiring and holding BTC.’
On June 29, Strategy authorized a program to sell up to $1.25 billion worth of BTC. After an initial sale of 32 BTC, the most recent sale of 3,588 BTC was the first meaningful installment of that program.
This isn’t the first crack in Saylor’s permabullish doctrine.
Strategy sold 704 BTC in December 2022, then within days, bought back those coins, calling it a tax-loss harvesting strategy at the time.
Years later, in May 2026, Strategy sold 32 coins, not bothering to dress that up as a tax maneuver.
The latest sale of 3,588 BTC dwarfs both of those prior sales and is the hardest to explain, especially due to the company already holding billions of dollars in its USD reserve prior to that sale.
The price of BTC immediately declined on the news this morning, losing roughly $20 billion in market cap from approximately $62,900 to $61,900 per BTC within 10 minutes of Saylor’s disclosure.
Strategy’s common stock, MSTR, opened roughly flat from Friday’s close of trading, remaining 78% below its 52-week high.
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