Strive and Strategy Deployed $513 Million Into Bitcoin the Same Week, at Nearly the Same Price

Strive bought 1,800 bitcoin for about $143 million between August 24 and August 28, at an average price of $79,431, lifting its holdings to 23,156 BTC and making it the fifth-largest publicly traded corporate holder of bitcoin. The purchase landed in the same week that Strategy returned to buying after a ten-week pause, acquiring 4,603 BTC for about $370 million at an average price near $80,380. Between them, the two treasuries deployed roughly $513 million over five trading days, at average prices within $1,000 of each other.

That is not really a coincidence. Both companies were buying into the same institutional-driven rally: spot bitcoin ETFs took in about $2.8 billion over the preceding two weeks as the price tested $80,000, a move analysts attributed to allocators rather than retail traders. What is more interesting than the timing is how differently each company is funding its accumulation, and what the difference reveals about the tightening margins on this kind of trade.

Strive's pace has moved by more than an order of magnitude in a month. Between July 20 and July 24, it bought just 79 bitcoin for about $5.2 million, at an average of $65,723. Five weeks later it deployed roughly 27 times that amount in a single week. The prices across its disclosed purchases trace bitcoin's path through the year: $116,047 per coin in September 2025, $91,561 in January 2026, $65,723 in late July, and $79,431 last week. Strive has been buying through the entire cycle, at every price point, in whatever size its financing allowed that month.

The financing is the part worth reading closely. Strive's cash position actually rose over the purchase period, from $171.9 million to $183.5 million, even as it spent $143 million on bitcoin. It funded this by issuing 3,579,147 new Class A shares, a 4.48% increase in shares outstanding, and 803,099 shares of its SATA perpetual preferred stock. SATA launched in November 2025 with a 12% annual dividend, since raised to roughly 13%, and Strive has described it explicitly as a way to reduce reliance on common-share dilution to fund purchases.

Measured against that dilution, bitcoin per effective common share rose from roughly 0.000238 to 0.000248, an increase of about 4.3%. That is the test the model sets for itself: issuing new shares to buy bitcoin only benefits existing holders if the bitcoin added outpaces the dilution required to buy it. On this week's numbers it did, but narrowly, by less than a single percentage point. It is a useful reminder that accretion in these structures is not automatic. It has to be re-earned with every purchase, and the margin can compress as a company's share count and preferred stack both grow.

The filing also disclosed something less obvious: Strive holds 505,000 shares of Strategy's Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock, known as STRC, carried at a fair value of $49.15 million, up from $48.57 million the week before. The position size did not change. Its value rose because Strategy repurchased $152 million of STRC over the same period, which Michael Saylor said tightened the security's bitcoin credit spread to 56 basis points from 59. Strive, in other words, made money passively from its rival's buyback in the same week it was independently buying bitcoin of its own. The two most prominent public bitcoin treasuries are not just running parallel strategies. They hold each other's paper.

Strive's own history explains why it has leaned so heavily on preferred stock rather than following Strategy's mix of convertible debt and multiple preferred tranches. The company was founded in 2022 by Vivek Ramaswamy as an asset manager, then went public as a bitcoin treasury company through a merger with Asset Entities that closed last September. It expanded again in January by acquiring Semler Scientific in an all-stock deal struck at roughly a 210% premium, absorbing Semler's existing bitcoin holdings along with a diagnostics business that management has said is not central to the company's future and will eventually be monetized and redeployed into more bitcoin.

None of this changes the basic thesis both companies are selling to shareholders, which is that a public equity or preferred security can be a leveraged, liquid proxy for bitcoin exposure without the margin-call risk of borrowing directly against the asset. What this week's disclosures show is how thin the operating margin on that thesis has become, and how interconnected the balance sheets behind it already are. A downturn sharp enough to widen credit spreads on one treasury's preferred stock would not stay contained to that one company's shareholders. It would show up, quietly, on a competitor's balance sheet too.

Bitcoin is trading near $81,100, up more than 4% in the past 24 hours and clearing $80,000 for the first time in several weeks, with the move tied to markets pricing in lower odds of further Fed rate hikes. The rally puts BTC roughly 36% below its October 2025 all-time high of $126,080, but it marks the strongest single-day move in over a month and comes as Strive and Strategy's combined purchases were already testing the market's appetite for bitcoin-treasury buying. A move of this size after both companies committed capital adds a data point in their favor: neither issuer needs immediate paper gains to validate an accretion strategy, but a rising spot price makes it easier for both stocks to hold or expand their mNAV premium in the near term, which is the mechanism that determines whether further share issuance for bitcoin purchases stays accretive or turns dilutive.