Strategy Buys $1.28 Billion in Bitcoin as STRC Sets Records and Winklevosses Reduce Exposure
A Confluence of Institutional Signals
Strategy acquired 17,994 Bitcoin for approximately $1.28 billion between March 3 and March 8, 2026, pushing its total holdings to 738,731 BTC at a cumulative cost of $56.04 billion. The purchase arrived while Bitcoin traded near $67,000 to $71,000, meaningfully below Strategy’s own average acquisition cost of $75,862 per coin. At the same time, on-chain analytics flagged the Winklevoss twins moving $130 million in Bitcoin toward Gemini hot wallets, ostensibly for liquidation. These two movements, one corporate entity scaling into a depressed position, another early-cycle holder trimming exposure, offer a useful window into the current state of institutional Bitcoin behaviour.
Strategy’s Purchase in Structural Context
The $1.28 billion acquisition is the firm’s largest since January 2026, when it bought 22,305 BTC at an average of $95,284 per coin for $2.13 billion. That January buy now sits well underwater on a mark-to-market basis. Bitcoin peaked near $126,000 in October 2025 before declining roughly 47 percent into early 2026; the asset currently trades at $69,400, up 0.52 percent over the past 24 hours.
What distinguishes the March purchase is that it represents deliberate accumulation beneath the firm’s own cost basis, a behaviour Strategy largely avoided during the 2022 to 2023 drawdown. In that earlier period, the company completed just seven smaller transactions totalling 28,560 BTC. Since February 9 of this year, it has executed five separate acquisitions amounting to 25,229 BTC, marginally reducing its average cost from $76,052 to $75,862. The mathematical reality of averaging into a position already exceeding 700,000 coins means that even substantial new purchases move the blended average only incrementally.
Strategy’s holdings now represent approximately 3.7 percent of Bitcoin’s circulating supply, which was approaching 20 million coins as of Monday. To contextualise the purchase volume differently: miners currently produce roughly 450 BTC per day following the April 2024 halving, meaning the company’s latest acquisition absorbed the equivalent of nearly five weeks of newly mined supply in a single transaction.
The STRC Mechanism and Its Record Issuance
The financing structure behind this accumulation deserves careful attention. Strategy funded the $1.28 billion purchase through $900 million in common stock sales and $377 million from its STRC preferred stock series. On Monday, March 10, the company reported its largest single-day STRC issuance, with roughly 2.4 million shares sold through the at-the-market programme, estimated to have funded the purchase of approximately 1,420 BTC in a single session. That figure surpassed the prior daily record of 1,069 BTC.
The record issuance followed a structural amendment to Strategy’s Omnibus Sales Agreement. The company now permits a second agent to execute STRC sales outside regular US trading hours, removing a prior restriction that limited such activity to one agent per session. The practical effect is an expanded window for capital deployment, allowing the firm to operate more continuously across global market hours. This is not a minor operational tweak; it materially increases the firm’s capacity to convert equity into Bitcoin on short notice.
STRC carries a dividend yield in the range of 11.5 percent, a figure that Peter Schiff, among others, has flagged as a cash obligation that grows heavier if Bitcoin prices remain depressed and MSTR shares continue trading at or below net asset value. Strategy reported a $12.4 billion net loss in the fourth quarter of 2025, driven primarily by unrealised losses under the new FASB fair-value accounting rules. Its mNAV ratio, which measures enterprise value relative to Bitcoin holdings, fell to between 0.78 and 1.06 by late December 2025, compared with levels above 2.0 during the firm’s premium period. The stock closed at approximately $133.50 on Friday, down more than 70 percent from its November 2024 high of $543.
B. Riley initiated coverage of Strategy with a buy rating on Monday, arguing that the sector’s valuation slump has reset entry points to more defensible levels and opened the door for new digital credit financing models. That perspective sits in direct tension with Schiff’s characterisation of the preferred instruments as structurally dangerous. Both assessments are grounded in the same data; the disagreement is one of risk tolerance and time horizon rather than factual dispute.
Strategy maintains a $2.25 billion cash reserve, estimated to cover approximately 21 months of dividend and interest obligations. The firm retains more than $10 billion in remaining capacity under its at-the-market equity programme. The financing engine has not seized, but the margin for error is narrower than it was twelve months ago.
Winklevoss Portfolio Management
Against this backdrop of aggressive corporate accumulation, Arkham Intelligence flagged a separate but notable movement. The Winklevoss twins transferred $130 million in Bitcoin to Gemini hot wallets over the past week, with Arkham characterising the transfer as “presumably to sell.” Following the move, the brothers retain an estimated $764 million in Bitcoin, giving them a remaining position still substantial by any measure.
The brothers reportedly began acquiring Bitcoin in 2011, purchasing the asset at approximately $120 per coin using proceeds from their legal settlement with Mark Zuckerberg. Arkham estimates their total profit-and-loss on the position at approximately $1.8 billion. The $130 million transfer therefore represents a partial reduction rather than an exit; their remaining $764 million holding reflects a long-term conviction that has survived multiple full market cycles.
Neither Cameron nor Tyler Winklevoss has commented publicly on the specific transfer. Their more recent public focus has centred on Cypherpunk Technologies, a firm dedicated to privacy-preserving assets. Cypherpunk recently committed $5 million to the Zcash Open Development Lab, its first investment outside ZEC. The pivot toward privacy infrastructure does not necessarily indicate a reduced conviction about Bitcoin; early-cycle holders with multi-hundred-percent gains routinely diversify capital toward adjacent theses without abandoning their core positions.
Reading the Divergence
The simultaneous occurrence of record STRC issuance, a nine-figure corporate purchase, and a meaningful holder reduction is not contradictory. It reflects the normal heterogeneity of a maturing market. Institutional entities with explicit treasury mandates and leverage-funded accumulation programmes operate on entirely different return horizons and liquidity constraints than individuals managing decade-long personal positions.
What the data from this two-day window establishes is that both sides of the trade are active at current price levels. Strategy’s average cost basis of $75,862 against a spot price of $69,400 means the firm is carrying a paper loss on its aggregate position; yet it continues to buy. The Winklevoss transfer, by contrast, suggests that holders sitting on gains of several thousand percent are finding current prices acceptable for partial realisation. Neither behaviour is irrational. They are simply different expressions of position management under the same market conditions.
The more consequential variable over the medium term is whether Strategy’s reflexive financing model can sustain itself if Bitcoin remains range-bound between $63,000 and $72,000. The mNAV compression that has already occurred suggests the market is pricing in elevated execution risk. If that range holds through the second quarter, the pressure on STRC dividend obligations and the common equity programme will become an increasingly central part of the analytical conversation around the stock.
