Bitcoin Just PROVED It Doesn't Need Saylor

On June 22nd, Michael Sailor bought 520 Bitcoin  and then he stopped 5 weeks with no buys. The   longest pause since this whole strategy began back  in 2020. And 6 days after that final purchase,   Bitcoin bottomed under 59K while strategy was  selling 3,588 coins straight into the low. The   biggest corporate buyer this market has ever seen  walked away and even began to sell some coins.   And then Bitcoin rallied anyway. For 2 years, the  loudest argument against Bitcoin was that if you   take away Sailor, the bid for Bitcoin disappears.  And if he were to ever sell, well, Bitcoin would   be over for good. Well, that argument just got  tested by the market and it failed. So today we're   looking at why Sailor stopped, what he's buying  instead of Bitcoin, and why the relationship   between Bitcoin and strategy is changing. My name  is Louis and this is the Coin Bureau. Now to get a   clear picture on the discussion today, we have to  remember what strategy actually represents in the   Bitcoin market. For 6 years, this company  had exactly one setting. Issue paper and   then buy Bitcoin. convertible notes, common  stock, four different flavors of preferred,   all of it funneling into the number one crypto  asset. The result is a balance sheet holding   $843,000 Bitcoin at an aggregate cost of about  $63 billion. That's an average price of around   $75,000 a coin. And Bitcoin, at least as I record  this, is sitting well below that in the 60ks. So,   the largest corporate Bitcoin position on Earth  is currently underwater by quite a bit. Now,   that alone wouldn't stop Sailor. Being underwater  has actually never stopped Sailor. What stopped   him was the structure of Strategy's operation. On  June 29th, Strategy filed an 8K announcing what   it calls the digital credit capital framework. And  when all is said and done, what that amounts to is   a total reversal of company policy. Four things  came out of that filing. First is a formal USD   reserve policy, a minimum cash floor equal to 12  months of preferred dividends and debt interest.   Second, a Bitcoin monetization program authorizing  the company to sell coins capped at $1.25 billion.   Third, $2 billion of buyback authority, 1  billion for its own preferred securities and   1 billion for its own common stock. And fourth,  a dividend hike on its STRC preferred up to 12%   a year. And so it became clear that strategy had  matured into a treasury department. CFO Andrew   Kang put it in three words that would have been  hearsay just 12 months ago. Bitcoin is capital.   That means treating it as capital. Something  you deploy when the return on deploying it   beats the return on holding it. But from there,  the story of strategy took another turn because   the flywheel that strategy became known for  during the upside of Bitcoin's most recent bull   market started spinning the other way. Between  July 20th and July 26, Strategy sold 5,429,160 of its own shares through its at the market  program and raised $544 million, half a billion   of fresh equity. And how much Bitcoin did Strategy  buy with that money? Well, zero. And that wasn't   the only raise. An earlier July window brought in  another $466 million, also with no coins attached.   So, Strategy is still issuing paper. It's just  that the paper now feeds the credit stack instead   of the coin stack. And what did they do with it?  Well, in that same window, July 20th to the 26th,   Strategy bought back 288,930 shares of its own  STRC Preferred for $25 million, average price   around $86.50. Against a par value of $100.  CEO Fong Lee asserted that below $100 a share,   repurchases reduce future dividend obligations  at a discount, which is in fairness good capital   allocation on the face of it. But it's just  that it's the exact opposite of everything   this company has ever told you about the value of  holding Bitcoin over holding dollars. And there's   $975 million of that authorization still unused.  Meanwhile, there's the cash pile. On June 28th,   Strategy held $2.55 billion in USD. By late July,  that number was 3.75 billion, an all-time high,   $3.75 billion in dollars, sitting in the  treasury of a company whose public identity   is that dollars are essentially melting ice  cubes in this fiat currency world of ours. That   $3.75 billion is roughly 2.1 years of coverage  on its preferred dividends and debt interest.   So the accumulation flywheel turned into more  of a deleveraging flywheel. Now if you remove   the largest most price insensitive buyer from  any market, the price should fall, right? But   that's not what we saw with strategy in Bitcoin.  So let's just walk through it to see exactly how   the market reacted to strategy shift. June 22nd,  that was the last purchase. June 27th to the 28th,   the market bottoms with Bitcoin printing a  year-to-date low close to 58K and closing June   30th at $58,500. June 29th to July 5th. Strategy  net sells 3,588 coins for about $216 million.   The largest holder in the world is a net seller at  the lows into the worst ETF month in the products   history. And yet by July 21st, Bitcoin had rallied  back to around $66,000. That's nearly a 14% move   off the bottom with the biggest buyer absent and  briefly on the wrong side of the book. So then   what took the other side? Well, we could start  with the ETFs, although that market did look   ugly for a bit. Starting with that ugliness,  US spot Bitcoin ETFs bled somewhere close to   $4.5 billion in June. That smashed the previous  record of 3.56 billion from February 2025. Black   Rockck's IBIT alone accounted for roughly $3  billion of it. And just quickly, it's worth   understanding how these products actually work in  this context. When shares get redeemed, authorized   participants have to sell actual spot bitcoin  to settle it. It's programmatic selling that   doesn't care what you think about the having. Some  analysts have estimated that every billion dollars   pulled out of these products dragged the spot  price down by several percent. So, these outflows   were outright bearish. But after those outflows  had run their course, things turned. A 10-day,   $2.73 billion redemption run snapped back on  July 2nd. And between July 14th and July 23rd,   the complex pulled in about $981 million across  seven sessions. IBIT taking roughly 71% of it. So,   the ETF bid finally showed up and it was met  with other eager market buyers. On July 2nd,   the same week Strategy was selling, Japan's  Metlanets bought 2,823 Bitcoin for $170 million,   taking its stack to around 43,000 coins.  One Treasury company selling into the low,   while another buys that same exact week.  And the onchain data tells a similar story.   Glass node figures reported by CoinDesk showed  long-term holders flipping from net distribution   to net accumulation in early July with smaller  and midsized wallets doing the buying. Bitwise   CIO Matt Hogan argued those holders provided  the liquidity that absorbed the ETF redemptions.   Cryptoquants Kiongj described it as a handoff.  Old whales selling ETFs and treasuries catching.   And Hogan's verdict on strategy itself was  interesting. Their run as the most dominant buyers   of Bitcoin, in his words, is likely finished. He  thinks institutions broadly fill that gap. So,   the marginal buyer went from one man with a  convertible bond desk to something distributed   and considerably harder to short. What if you  could trade real US stocks like Apple, Nvidia,   or Tesla without leaving your crypto account?  Well, that's the idea behind our tokens from   BitGet. These are tokenized stocks backed one to  one by real shares. But the key difference is they   are actually usable. You can trade them, use them  as margin, and even earn dividends instead of just   letting them sit in your wallet. So, if you want  to check them out for yourself, sign up for BitGet   using the link in the description or by scanning  this QR code. Now before we all get carried away,   there is something else that deserves mentioning.  The real bear case here comes from everyone   who copied Sailor. July saw a wave of smaller  digital asset treasury companies liquidating.   Satsuma Technology voted to sell its entire 668  Bitcoin position and delist from the London Stock   Exchange. Prenetics dumped its full 510 coins.  Genius Group liquidated its whole treasury to   repay $8.5 million of debt. Empir Digital sold  1,400 coins to repay debt, cover legal costs,   and partly fund a stake in an AI data center  project. So, every company on that list sold   to meet a payment that was coming due. Meanwhile,  Nansen's analysts have been warning that July's   recovery looks more like a positioning bounce than  a regime change, with Bitcoin capable of retesting   the mid50ks if ETF demand doesn't stick. Bitfinex  flagged 68K as the make or break level going into   August since that's roughly the average entry of  the last 5 months of buyers. So, Bitcoin is not   out of the woods yet. But here's what's changed.  The forced seller thesis on strategy used to be   unfalsifiable. You had roughly 4% of all Bitcoin  that will ever exist sitting inside a leveraged   entity with a preferred dividend stack and no  disclosed limit on what it might have to sell.   That risk was completely unquantifiable, which  left the market free to assume the worst. But   that June 29th filing put a number on it, $1.25  billion. Roughly 20,800 coins or about 2.5% of   the holdings. That is a broad authorized published  maximum. And they've used about 17% of it so far.   Before this framework was decided upon, strategy  was carrying around 10 months of cushion against   its dividend and interest obligations. Today,  with a $3.75 billion reserve against roughly 1.76   billion of annual obligations, it's carrying  somewhere between 24 and 28 months. The bear   case relied a lot on Strategy's ability to cover  dividend payments, but the firm's coverage has   more than doubled. They helped address concerns  about keyman risk by issuing paper and shoring up   a beefy buffer of cash. And there's one detail in  that policy worth noting. The USD Reserve is not   allowed to fund the preferred buybacks. Those have  to come from equity issuances or Bitcoin sales. So   the cash meant to pay dividends is ring fenced  from the cash used to opportunistically retire   dividends. Which brings us to the allimportant  number in this dynamic and that of course is MNAV.   MNAV is simply the multiple of the underlying  Bitcoin that the market is willing to pay for the   company. Above one, issuing shares to buy coins  creates value for existing holders. Below one,   it destroys it. On June 27th, Strategy's  Enterprise MNAF fell below one for the first   time in its history. And so, the market was saying  that the Strategy operation no longer works.   Depending on whose calculation you looked at, MNAV  fell as low as 0.72. But as I make this video,   that multiple sits at roughly 1.03. So, the  company stopped buying Bitcoin, sold some   Bitcoin, raised equity it refused to spend on  Bitcoin, and the market rerated it upwards.   Benchmark's Mark Palmer is still carrying a  $570 target on the stock, calling the reserve   build disciplined capital allocation. Elsewhere,  Peter Schiff predictably thinks the common stock   goes to zero, pointing to Bitcoin yield per share  collapsing from 13.3% in May to 4.5% by late July.   Now, you might reasonably be thinking that none  of this matters to you unless you own MSTR. But   it does impact you if you own any Bitcoin because  every time the strategy complex takes a hit in   the market, your Bitcoin is likely to sell off.  You were in essence short one company's dividend   calendar. But that's the thing that just got  smaller, bounded and funded 2 years deep. So,   who actually profited from all of the fear around  strategy? Well, the people who sold you the story   that Bitcoin was a one-man leveraged trade and  shorted the equity into a 40% 3-month draw down.   This whole thing was a capital structure  problem, but people were trying to insist   that it was a Bitcoin problem. For 2 years, the  bare case centered entirely around strategy and   sailors musings rather than Bitcoin itself. July  was a big test for that thesis. The buyer stopped,   sold 3,588 coins into the low, raised a billion  dollars of equity, and spent none of it on   Bitcoin, and the price went up anyway, carried by  ETF flows and a few hundred,000 long-term holders.   Bitcoin's original case as a digital asset never  had anything to do with corporate treasuries,   and you could easily argue that it just spent  a month proving that once more in the public   markets. But what do you think? Is this a  decoupling that holds even if strategy stays   on the sidelines for the rest of the year? Or is  July just a positioning bounce that unwinds the   second the next dividend calendar comes due? Let  me know in the comments down below. And if you're   more concerned about the fate of altcoins than you  are about the fate of Bitcoin and strategy, well   then you should definitely check out our video  on where altcoins stand in 2026 right over here.   Thank you all so much for watching and I'll see  you again very soon. This is Lewis signing off.