Strategy Inc (MSTR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
August 17, 2026
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Natalie Brunell
attendeeHello, everyone, and welcome. I'm Natalie Brunell, author of Bitcoin is for Everyone and host of the Coin Stories podcast. And I'm very happy to be back moderating Strategy's second, live investor Q&A. We're live today on X and YouTube, and over the next hour or so, we will get to as many of your questions as we can. They were submitted directly by retail and institutional investors through the company's official question form and on X. We received dozens and dozens of submissions covering a range of topics and my job today is simply to put those questions to the company's leaders and keep us moving so we can cover as much ground as possible. If you're watching live, you can continue submitting questions in the replies and my colleague, Alex Devani, will be looking out for new topics and angles that haven't already been covered by the submissions we received over the last week. And if you can't stay for the entire hour, don't worry, the full replay will be available on Strategy's platform along with mine. Now before I introduce our guests, a brief disclosure: some statements made during today's presentation regarding future expectations, plans and prospects may constitute forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially due to important factors, including fluctuations in the price of Bitcoin and the risks described in Strategy's SEC filings, including its quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed on August 3, 2026. This presentation is for informational purposes only. It is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities and it is not investment, financial, legal or tax advice. Any offering of securities will be made only by means of a prospectus and additional information about Strategy is available at strategy.com. So with that, let me introduce Michael Saylor, the Founder and Executive Chairman of Strategy; and Phong Le, Strategy's Chief Executive Officer, Michael and Phong, great to have you back.
Michael Saylor
executiveHappy to be here.
Phong Le
executiveThanks for having us, Natalie.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeAll right. Well, we have a lot of questions to get through. So let's jump right in. The first one came from several investors and it's directed to you, Michael. You recently posted a chart on your X page, where you outlined a digital asset monetary spectrum. That included digital capital, digital credit, digital money and digital currency. What is SR-strcUSX, which you described in that visual as digital money? And do you disagree that Bitcoin is money?
Michael Saylor
executiveI think if you're using the theoretical term for money, then you would say money is -- money is a nonsovereign, store-of-value bearer instrument like gold. But that's a classical Austrian economist view of money. The current conventional view of money is that money is a U.S. dollar equivalent or fiat currency equivalent asset like the U.S. dollar that holds its peg against the fiat currency. So I think that 99% of the world thinks that money is a fiat currency and a money market is a fiat currency that generates yield. I think that there's 1% of the world that are Austrian economists that think that money as gold, some of them take money as silver and money as Bitcoin. But I think that's an academic debate and there's not much point in getting mired in an academic debate because about 0.1% of the capital in the world or 0.1% of the economic value in the world has actually invested in the Bitcoin network right now. 99% of all the capital, all the money, all the stuff of value is invested in stuff other than the Bitcoin ecosystem right now. A lot of that's equity capital. A lot of it's real estate capital. Some of it is metallic capital like gold. Some of it is credit, hundreds of trillions of dollars of credit. So, I think that if you want the Bitcoin network to grow by a factor of 10 or 100, then you're going to have to attract capital from the traditional finance establishment. And that means attracting equity capital flows or credit capital flows or money market flows. So for people that have not yet bought Bitcoin, the ones that we're actually working to serve, their view is that money is a medium of exchange, or unit of account, or store of value, and they would think that that's the Japanese yen in Japan or yen money market in Japan. They would think it's a U.S. dollar money market in the U.S. I think it's a euro money market or a euro in the European Union. And so the TradFi or the Keynesian view of money is, "money is a fiat currency or a fiat currency equivalent that pays yield." So the chart that I'm illustrating is the digital asset's taxonomy. We think that digital -- Bitcoin is capital, and so digital capital is Bitcoin and Bitcoin competes against gold, real estate, equity capital or credit capital or money markets held as capital or art those are all the things that Bitcoin competes against 99 -- again, 99% or 99.9% of the economic value of the capital in the world is not Bitcoin. So if you want to get it, you need to compete against those things. You need to tell people why Bitcoin is better than gold, art or real estate or equity like the S&P Index or a bar of gold. STRC is digital credit. We've extracted a credit instrument from capital. It's semi volatile. It's not as volatile as Bitcoin, but it's more volatile than a fiat currency. And the next step is to take STRC and create something that looks like a digital money. And digital money would be the mythical going back stablecoin. It's the -- it's a fiat currency stable asset, whether it's a stable dollar or a stable yen or stable euro, but pays yield. So the difference between digital currency and digital money is digital currency is deemed to be stablecoins. It's like Tether or Circle or any other digital stablecoin in whatever currency system is out there. Digital currencies don't pay yield. So digital currencies are the winners of medium exchange in the crypto ecosystem and the digital assets ecosystem. I think that, that's -- there are some fundamentalist Bitcoin OGs that wish that wasn't the case or that they've been hoping it wouldn't be the case. But I think that at this point in the year 2026, we can see that substantially all the prices in the world, if I were to say 99.9999% of the prices in the world are in fiat currency, I might be understating the case. It's just to somewhere between 6 and 100 significant digits after the decimal place. All the prices are in fiat currencies, which means that the medium exchange is generally the U.S. dollar. If you're holding stablecoins, they don't pay a yield. Though it makes a good medium of exchange, it makes a very poor store of value, or a weak store of value. The idea behind digital money is to take the best of digital credit and the best of digital currency and merge the two together and create something which is generally stable to fiat currency, but pays a yield. And so if you can actually create a yield on a stable currency instrument, then you've got something which serves as a much better store of value. So that particular asset that I put in my chart, that's the first example. Well, one of the first examples, maybe the first example of someone creating a digital money asset. And they're creating a digital money asset by engineering a stable asset that actually has yield, the yield comes from digital credit and the asset is stabilized through some financial engineering to be stable to a U.S. dollar. I expect there'll be dozens, if not hundreds of different types of monetary assets that people build. So it's not the only one. I think there's about a dozen different organizations that are building digital monetary assets and the digital assets ecosystem. And I don't think digital money be limited to tokens. I actually think that you'll see digital money funds created as ETFs in the United States and probably as ETPs and other types of publicly traded funds that trade on and exchanges all around the world. And I also think that we'll see private funds, just like -- there are money market funds that are private that don't trade publicly. There are money market funds that are public that trade as ETFs. And there are monetary instruments like currencies that are stablecoins. So the thing that we think is really important is that Bitcoin is going to grow by a factor of 10 or a factor of 100, we need to facilitate capital flows from the credit markets and the money markets. And right now, what's going on, if you took away STRC and you took away the digital money tokens that are now starting to develop, then what you have is, fiat currency flowing into the stablecoin market, and it's all backed by currencies, by fiat currency, like U.S. dollars. And then you have capital flowing into the capital market that actually supports BTC. But there would be no capital flows from the credit markets or the money markets into this ecosystem. If we create good credit, then we will be able to create monetary instruments on top of it. And the companies that create a digital credit like Strategy and Strive, will have equities and the equities will attract capital flows, which will also flow into Bitcoin. And companies that create digital monetary instruments, the instruments that will be on top of digital credit, they'll have equity as well, and they will attract capital flows into the ecosystem. So we think that the economy will grow if we actually create credit instruments, money instruments, currency instruments and equity instruments, all of them that are tied in or backed -- either backed by BTC or tied into the Bitcoin ecosystem. So that was an example of the first of what I think will be many digital money instruments. It's not the only one. And certainly, I'm not endorsing that particular one as an investment. It's a security type investment. But I think that it's a seminal event in the same way that when people first created money market funds, that was a pretty important event. And when people created ETFs backed by money market funds, I think that's an important event.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeAll right. Let's turn now to the equity side, to the common stock, MSTR. We have a question from Rob. He said, I have 3 children, and I invested $73,000 each into MSTR, believing in the long-term potential. Today, that $73,000 is worth $20,000 and the long-term potential is now a function of getting back to breakeven. MSTR common shareholders seem to be your lowest priority. You defend STRC and pay down converts using MSTR at-the-market offerings. Achieving BTC per share yield doesn't do much for my kids. I have a decade-long perspective, but I'm worried that you will ATM so much that we'll never get back to [ $325 ] a share. Have you considered paying out a dividend to MSTR common shareholders simply to do something right by them in the near term?
Phong Le
executiveI can start on that and Mike can add. And Rob, thanks for being a shareholder and investing some money into MSTR for your children. Of course, the common shareholders in MSTR is our most important priority and creating value and increasing the price of MSTR is our #1 priority. How do we do that? We do that by outperforming Bitcoin. And since the beginning of our strategy, putting Bitcoin on our balance sheet, that was August of 2020, Bitcoin has been up 32%, MSTR has been up 41%. So we've outperformed Bitcoin over time, and I understand that you came in later and haven't seen that outperformance. What happens over time, right? When Bitcoin is up, we tend to go up more because we have more Bitcoin per share. And we do that via historically leverage, and we've done that more recently via amplification. What that does mean and what you'd experience is when Bitcoin goes down, we tend to go down more. So Bitcoin has seen a drawdown of 50% from all-time highs. MSTR has seen a drawdown roughly 75% of all-time highs because Bitcoin is our underlying asset, increasing Bitcoin per share increases the value of MSTR when Bitcoin goes up, and we'll see sharper drawdowns. So how do we increase Bitcoin per share? We increased Bitcoin per share historically through leverage, through convertible bonds and more recently through what Mike talked about, which is digital credit and amplification through stretch. And so ultimately, if we want the common to go up, we have to increase Bitcoin per share and increased Bitcoin per share means making stretch work, which is why it may seem like we're talking primarily about stretch right now, getting stretch back to par, but that's what gets Bitcoin per share to go up and MSTR the common to go up over time. We're not going to pay a dividend. That's not really the best deployment of capital, the best deployment of capital for us is to stretch to work to buy Bitcoin and put it on our balance sheet. And that's ultimately the objective of the company. And so over time, if you believe in the underlying asset Bitcoin and Bitcoin starts to rise for all the characteristics Mike had mentioned before, then MSTR will start to rise over time. And that's ultimately the goal of the company.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeMichael, do you want to weigh in at all on that?
Michael Saylor
executiveYes. What I'd say is, if you want a dividend, you should buy one of the preferred stocks, like STRD pays like almost like 15% effective yield. So if you're looking for a stable instrument that pays a dividend and I would look to STRC or STRK, they were designed to pay dividends and give some upside. If your time horizon is less than 4 months, you probably should own a money market. If you don't need -- if you are making an investment and want the money back, and want to see a good return on investment in 4 months to 4 years, you're probably a credit investor and you want to look to -- you ought to consider one of the credit instruments. If you're holding the equity, then you need a time horizon minimal of 4 years, right, ideal 7 to 10 years. Bitcoin was an all-time high about a year ago. So when we're in a bear market, you're going to get more amplified Bitcoin. So you got -- Bitcoin is down 50%, we're going to be down 75%. And in a bull market, we expect to outperform Bitcoin. So when you're buying MSTR, you're getting amplified Bitcoin when you're buying Bitcoin, you're getting on a roller coaster. So if you are going to get on a roller coaster, then probably you want to use a metric that's like a 4-year blended metric. So when we look at Bitcoin, we looked at 200-week simple moving average and that way, we take a 4-year cycle view, and we consider how is it trading versus the 4-year average. I think that MSTR is going to be more volatile than that. So I think the whole point of the equity is to generate amplification. And so if we were to pay the dividend, we would be actually undermining the equity value proposition and we'd be undermining the credit value proposition. And the reason that the equity is so volatile is because we sell the credit. And the reason that we're working hard to build the balance sheet is because the company's future is based upon the credit. If we can sell $10 billion a year worth of STRC and if BTC outperforms our hurdle rate, it's about 10%, 10.5% right now, then the $10 billion of credit we sold starts to look like net income to the common stock equity holders. So that being the case, you'll get a multiple on the credit sales. If there are no credit sales, then there isn't anything to multiply. And so the single most important thing is for us to stabilize the credit business and to build the most sustainable, highest quality credit business that we can. And so the equity will actually come later, right? We're in an investment mode to build a credit if we do the things that are good for the equity in the near term, they're bad for the equity over the long term. And on the other hand, if we do the things that are good for the credit in the near term, that will be good for the equity. So ultimately, the product of the company is the credit. And the better the credit is, the more valuable the company is. And we think the company will be very, very valuable if we make the credit, especially STRC successful. So we're making a long-term investment. It's not unlike Netflix or Amazon, when Amazon was building out Amazon and Prime, they were providing cheap shipping and -- or free shipping for a long period of time and people thought it was not great for the equity, but at the point where everybody in the country is subscribed to the product and they all use the product and Amazon won the market. And our view is the same. We want to win the digital credit market, and we -- ultimately, we want to create the world's best credit. And if we do that, then the primary beneficiaries will be the equity holders, of which I'm a big one. I have more than 19 million shares of the equity. So I feel your pain, but I think we have to be prepared to have difficult years. It might be 1 year, it might be 2 years. We wouldn't think it would be 4 years but we might have to actually ride through some number of months or a year or 2 in order to get to the point where things start to work to the benefit of the equity.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeMultiple investors pointed out that you recently sold Bitcoin and you recently purchased back STRC. Are there any plans to buy back MSTR?
Michael Saylor
executiveI think we're open to buying back MSTR if it trades at a discount to NAV or if it's the right thing for the company to do. We evaluate all these programs week by week, day by day. Right now, STRC is trading at a discount to par. So it's a pretty obvious thing for us to do. And MSTR is not trading at a discount to NAV. So we're prepared to do it at some point if we needed to, if MSTR's trading at a very, very deep discount to NAV, then probably you would see us do something like that. But right now, it's not the highest priority of the company. The best thing we can do right now is fix the credit. If we fix the credit, the equity premium should expand and that will be good for the equity. If we take the capital that we could use to fix the credit and start buying back the equity, that would be equity -- that would be credit negative. And if it's credit negative and the credit business weakens then even if you were trying to buy the equity in the open market, it would be weakening because the fundamental question is, is the credit business worth $100 billion or $1 trillion? If there is no credit business, the answer is no. It's worth zero. But if there is a credit business, then there's just a debate over whether or not it's worth $50 billion or $100 billion or $250 billion or $1 trillion. And so the single most important thing for us to do is make the credit work. And right now, we're allocating our capital to doing that.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeOkay. So fix the credit, fix the equity. Phong, this question is for you from Johanna Schmidt. CEO Phong Le has cited JPMorgan as a model for how Strategy should evolve for digital credit, yet Bitcoin's entire philosophy was designed as a direct alternative to the centralized trust-based banking system that JPMorgan represents. Doesn't modeling Strategy's business, including STRC after a centralized institution like JPMorgan contradict the decentralized principles that Bitcoin was built on? And how do you reconcile pursuing a JPMorgan-style corporate structure while staying true to Bitcoin's founding philosophy?
Phong Le
executiveYes. Let me address that. But I do want to follow up on the previous question because I think there is this misconceived notion that issuing our equity is dilutive to our shareholders. If we sell digital credit, STRC, and we issue equity to pay dividend, it's highly accretive to our shareholders. If we issue equity that's greater than 1x NAV, NAV and we're currently about 1.07x to buy Bitcoin that's actually accretive to our shareholders because it increases Bitcoin per share. If we issue equity to buy back STRC at a discount at which we issued it. So if we issue STRC at $100 we issue equity above 1x NAV. And we buy STRC back at $95, that's also accretive to our shareholders. And so and it's accretive to Bitcoin per share, that's what matters. So I just want to make sure that, that's understood because a lot of times, people like Saylor's hitting the ATM, that's dilutive to shareholders. And that's not necessarily correct on a Bitcoin per share basis.
Michael Saylor
executiveAnd the last trade is that we sell the equity at a premium to NAV to buy U.S. dollars, that's also accretive to the shareholders. So all the trades we're doing are accretive. They're strengthening the balance sheet, the company, they're strengthening the company, they're improving our long-term prospects.
Phong Le
executiveWe don't want to be JPMorgan. We want to be the JPMorgan of digital assets, right, which is a big difference, right? Like there are a lot of things to admire about JPMorgan. They're the most valuable bank in the world. We would like to be the most valuable digital asset company in the world, right? They have a great amount of trust, a great amount of equity value. We would love to have the amount of trust and equity value in the digital asset world that JPMorgan has in the traditional banking world. They are one of the largest players in the repo market, right? They're a bank that the federal government turns to at times for assistance, if it's needed. We want to have that level of trust and scale in the digital asset world. But we're not modeling our business after JPMorgan. The analogy is we want to be the largest and most important player in the digital asset world. That starts with holding the most Bitcoin in the world, which we have now at 4%. That continues with building products on top of Bitcoin like digital equity which is MSTR, digital credit which is STRC, and it continues with then having other players in the digital asset world build products on top of ours, like digital money, which Mike mentioned earlier. So we believe that being the largest holder of Bitcoin allows us to have the stature that JPMorgan has. But we're not modeling our business after that. So that was really the point there. It's much like when Mike says that STRC is the iPhone, our iPhone moment. Obviously, we're not trying to build a business modeled after the iPhone or Apple. But the iPhone is the most successful product in the history of the world, and we think STRC can be the most successful digital credit product in the world.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeThis next question comes from @grainofsalt. Would Strategy sell STRC and use the proceeds for a cash reserve and MSTR buybacks in addition to buying Bitcoin. This was suggested in the Q1 earnings presentation and is it still a viable option?
Michael Saylor
executiveSure. Yes, we can use the capital. We could swap STRC for MSTR. We can swap STRC for USD. We can swap STRC for BTC. We could swap STRC for any other debt instrument or credit instrument outstanding. So -- and there are probably other things we could do with it as well. But we're very open-minded about how we use the capital.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeNext question is from Garrett. What is your stance on MSCI's recent rule change proposal to remove Bitcoin Treasury Companies from their index? And what do you expect this removal would do to the stock prices?
Phong Le
executiveI can start with the latter, right? MSCI indices represent somewhere between 3% and 4% of our current shares if we were to be excluded from their indices, then you could expect that to create some selling pressure over a period of time. But it's really immaterial to us, right? Like 3% to 4% isn't something that is going to cause a major change in our share price over a period of time. So I would call it immaterial and Bitcoin is even less important right, 0.1% perhaps if you include what we hold in terms of Bitcoin. More importantly, I don't think MSCI is aligned with the U.S. government world markets or other indices. I think the fact that they're taking a second cut at this is a bit ill-advised. They've taken a different approach to it, which is to redefine what an operating asset is the SEC and FASB have defined what an operating asset is for Strategy and Bitcoin certainly is that, they don't see Bitcoin as an operating asset. So I think they're sort of taking a position against general accepted accounting principles in the SEC. And so we'll go back and we'll respond to them and try to understand better why they're taking this approach that's antagonistic to Bitcoin, the asset class. And I think they will consider our responses and others and be constructive about this and hopefully not move forward with their latest proposal. But even if they do, right, I don't think it's that important to us in the end.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeAll right. This question comes from Sergio. Could Strategy eventually build a $20 billion to $30 billion USD reserve, mainly through STRC to deploy aggressively during future bear markets and could a larger cash buffer also strengthen the case for S&P 500 inclusion?
Michael Saylor
executiveI think we'll always carry large cash balances going forward. And over time, we expect the U.S. dollar reserve balances to grow. We expect BTC reserves to grow. We expect the operating cash or U.S. cash balance that's unrestricted grow, and we will use that opportunistically to buy back our credit, buy back our stock or buy back our debt or buy Bitcoin whenever we think it makes sense. So the company's optionality is growing. And at this point, we would expect we'll just keep getting larger from here. And we will have more trading options than we've had in the past.
Phong Le
executiveAnd on the question around S&P inclusion, I mean, there's two different things here. One is S&P, the Ratings. The second is S&P, the Index. On the ratings, right, we currently have a B- corporate rating, I think increasing the cash reserve will help with that, right? And could over time, improve our rating. Ultimately, what will improve the rating is whether they deem Bitcoin as capital that we have in our balance sheet right now, they see it as not true capital, it's a 0 value. If that changes, then our rating will go up, and that's probably the most important thing, more important than having U.S. dollars. Index inclusion, I don't think is directly correlated to the U.S. dollars and our -- on our balance sheet.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeJerry asked. Is the focus permanently on Bitcoin per share accretion via financing? Or could opportunistic spot purchases play a larger role in supporting liquidity and price discovery going forward?
Michael Saylor
executiveOur primary focus is to create digital credit that strips a large portion of the volatility off of Bitcoin and extracts a yield. And so that's STRC, we're not really traders. We think that, that market, which is -- the digital credit market right now is about $15 billion. We think it can become $100 billion, then $200 billion, then $400 billion, then $1 trillion. So the business of the company is to create the credit, the trade that we're making is we're willing to bet that Bitcoin will outperform our hurdle rate. Right now our hurdle rate is 10.5% or something we update on our website, every 15 seconds. The duration of the company, the duration is like 33 years. And so the business of the company is we're sort of betting sometime over the next 10 to 30 years that we're right, right? And we're not really traders from day to day. So we're not -- the reason you should buy the equity is not because we trade Bitcoin. If you really think that you found someone that can trade Bitcoin really well, you should invest in their private fund. The reason you should buy the equity is because the company has $60 billion of capital and can create $5 billion or $10 billion or $20 billion a year of credit. And if Bitcoin beats the hurdle rate, that means the company makes $20 billion a year. And if you want to own a company that makes $20 billion a year, that can grow 30% a year than we're that company, right? So if you believe in digital credit, then you would look at it and say, okay, well, the company that can do that is very valuable. I think that as a practical matter, we will hold more cash and Bitcoin is trading at an extreme premium to the 200 week moving average, we'll probably tend to acquire cash rather than BTC when we sell credit and a Bitcoin is trading at a low premium or a discount to the 200 week moving average. We probably lean toward a bit more BTC than cash. So I think that where Bitcoin is in the cycle may drive our cash to BTC allocations. But ultimately, we're not traders, and I think what people oftentimes they miss is -- they don't realize that in a bull market, our equity premiums expand. So demand for the equity expands, the equity premium expands, demand for the credit expands, the credit risk on the credit falls and so both the equity and the credit businesses explode and capital flows to the company. So in a bull market when the Bitcoin price is rising or is high, we will tend to have a lot more capital come in the door and therefore, we'll buy a lot more Bitcoin because that's when the capital comes. And in a bear market, when Bitcoin is crashing, the equity premiums compress and the credit weakens and there is less demand for the credit and there's less demand for the equity. And so we will tend to buy less Bitcoin in a weak Bitcoin market than in a strong market. But at the end of the day, if we're selling the equity at a premium to underlying Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin rallies and we're selling the equity at a massive premium, the fact that we paid double when we sold the equity for triple isn't a problem, it was still accretive to the company. So the price of Bitcoin when we're swapping equity for Bitcoin doesn't matter. And the price of Bitcoin when we swap credit for Bitcoin only matters over the duration of the credit. So over a decade, if we're wrong, then we'll be wrong in 10 years on the credit, but with the equity we can never be wrong, like Bitcoin rallies and our equity premium expands, we could pay $1 million of coin for Bitcoin, and we pay for it with a massive stock price of $25,000 a share, we swap it Bitcoin might crash from $1 million to $200,000 and people who say, you're crazy, you bought it in 5x more than it is. But the point is we swapped equity for the Bitcoin at the top of the market. And so -- and at the bottom of the market, the question is not, well, the Bitcoin draw down. The question is over the next 10 years, will Bitcoin outperform our hurdle rate or the cost of the credit. And at the end of the 10 years, we'll know. So we're long-term thinkers. We're not short-term traders and the amount of acquisition of dollars or Bitcoin or the amount of capital markets activity we engage in, is really dictated by the capital markets, that's Bitcoin. Bitcoin is capital. The credit markets, that's the demand for STRC and then the equity markets, the demand for MSTR and even to a certain degree, the derivatives market, so those capital markets, they're all moving independently and sometimes they're correlated And we are participating in all of them every day. And so that's the key thing to keep in mind when you consider what will we do and why do we do what we do.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeAll right. We are a little over halfway through this Q&A session. I'm going to take a question from our live audience. This one is from Tim Fiaca. What do you think of the business model to acquire cash-flowing businesses backed by Bitcoin treasuries like ORANGE JUICE. Do you see yourself adopting some sort of cash flowing business model in the future? And what are your thoughts on the potential benefit of cash flow for MSTR?
Michael Saylor
executiveWe won't do it. It's a perfectly fine business model for other people to do. I mean for ORANGE JUICE, it's perfectly fine. And there are other businesses that are in the business and our investors are in the business of acquiring cash flowing business. So that's their business model. Our business model is to create digital credit. And if we were to start to divert from that, we'll be distracting ourselves or diluting our focus. And so it creates all sorts of operational complications of different types. It would be -- it would undermine the equity, it would be harder for equity investors to properly handicap and trade the equity because we would be creating heterogeneous performance in the equity, you would have to have a forecast or you have to have an opinion on every single thing we own. Right now, if you're an equity investor, you just have to have a model for BTC. It would also underline the derivatives markets. And so people that trade the call options and the put options, and that's a massive $30 billion, $40 billion interest business, they would be undermined if we started to diversify into cash flowing business. And it would also undermine the credit because now instead of having a homogeneous credit model where you can recalculate the credit risk every 15 seconds, you would have to create a heterogeneous credit model where you consider the credit risk that is implied by bolting on another business to our existing business. And so we think it would be dilutive. It's a dilutive distraction for us. That's why we don't do it. we're laser focused on our business model, which we think is the best business model that we could possibly execute on.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeAll right. Let's pivot some questions to specifically digital credit. What lessons has the management team learned from the recent STRC drawdown and recovery that could be applied to increase adoption moving forward?
Michael Saylor
executivePhong, do you want to take that?
Phong Le
executiveI'll start with -- the biggest lesson is the importance of having U.S. dollar liquidity in our balance sheet as a backstop to the dividends, right? And that's why we now have USD 4.8 billion. I think that's the biggest lesson and we'll apply that going forward, right? The question of, would we use stretch for something other than Bitcoin? Yes, potentially when we raise money from stretch going forward, we would add to U.S. dollar reserve or some other former U.S. dollar liquidity so that we backstop the dividends, and we create confidence in institutional investors, especially buying into stretch.
Michael Saylor
executiveYes. I would say we learned -- we have to be prepared to buy or sell anything at any time. So the company needs to be able to sell Bitcoin as well as buy Bitcoin for the Bitcoin to be fairly valued. And if we're not willing to sell it, then the credit is not fairly valued because if we're not willing to sell the Bitcoin to fund the credit dividends, then that's credit negative. So we have to be able to trade BTC. We also realize that if we want to stabilize STRC, we have to be prepared to buy it as well as sell it. So we were very good at selling STRC at $100, and we are very good at buying BTC. But now we have illustrated to the market that we can sell BTC and we can buy STRC. So it's kind of like you can't just have a right hand, you got to have a left hand in a right hand or maybe the car has to be able to turn left and turn right. And I think that we also -- to Phong's point, we have to show that we can dynamically manage our reserves and the U.S. dollar reserve, the unrestricted cash, the restricted cash and the BTC. And all of those things are important. I think the other important thing we learned is we need to have a focus upon the capital structure, and we need to keep improving the capital structure, and we need to keep a laser-like focus upon the quality of the capital structure if we're going to grow the credit business.
Natalie Brunell
attendeePhong, when we were on stage in Las Vegas for the Bitcoin conference. You talked about how 80% stretch holders at the time were retail. This question comes from Stewart. He said recently, I have seen you post about huge allocations from institutional funds to STRC. Why did retail lead the way on the product? And why are institutions now coming around? And what is the split now?
Phong Le
executiveI think anytime you have a new product category, digital credit being one of them. Retail tends to be the early adopters, institutional, especially in something like digital credit. They want to see 1, 2, sometimes even 3 years of track record of the product paying dividends. They want to see a track record in the price. So they tend to lag. What's interesting is that 80/20 is now 70-30. By the way, it doesn't mean that retail decline, retail doubled institutions just increased significantly over that time. So we're already seeing institutional adoption start to increase. I think our digital credit capital framework created more confidence in institutions. And as good as to have retail, institutions tend to be longer-term holders, they tend to take on less leverage so they'll stabilize stretch over time.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeWe've had a couple of investors curious about whether STRC could move to daily dividends like SATA and whether other preferreds will move to monthly dividends or daily dividends?
Michael Saylor
executiveRight now, we don't have a plan to change the other preferreds. The STRD, E, F, and K are all institutional offerings and the institutions that are holding them have been comfortable with the quarterly payout. And so we expect that will remain that way for the foreseeable future. We're watching SATA cheerfully and enthusiastically, but we don't have any plans to go to daily dividends at this point. Our primary focus is on improving credit quality of STRC and focusing upon the balance sheet of the company. Phong, do you have any thoughts on this?
Phong Le
executiveNo, that's it. I think daily dividends is an interesting concept, and we're watching SATA, but semi-monthly seems to be quite powerful with our investor base.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeWe've got several STRK investors. One of them from the live chat wants to know if you would consider buying back STRK?
Michael Saylor
executiveRight now, our focus is on returning STRC to health. So you can expect we'll be laser-like on that. After STRC returned to health, and we want that credit instrument to be stable and to be -- and to grow in a predictable fashion. And so that's our focus right now. After that, then we'll look at all the other instruments and consider if there's an appropriate thing to do for the investors in the company. We think, by the way, the best thing we can do for an STRK investor or any other investor is to return STRC to health, right? Because the things that we're doing that are good for STRC are also good for STRK.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeA question came in from John Li Dumas. Under what circumstances would strategy be comfortable letting STRC trade materially above $101 rather than taking actions to bring it back to par? And what would be the strategic rationale for allowing that premium to persist?
Michael Saylor
executiveWe won't do that. It's -- our target range is $99 to $100, but we have no interest in allowing it to trade substantially above $100. And the reason why is this, the important investor proposition is when it gets to $100, you can sell it at $100 and you won't be leaving money on the table. And then you can buy it at $100, right? And then you can buy pretty much whatever amount you need at $100.01 and you can sell into the market at $100. And if we allow the price to fluctuate plus or minus x dollars, then you paralyze the market. So someone that was thinking about selling at $100 would think, well, maybe I shouldn't because it might be -- it might go to $102 or $101. And so instead of making a decision in 15 seconds to sell it, they would be paralyzed. If you actually look at the impact, if it trades between $95 and $105, people might very well take 3 months to make a decision that they would make in 3 seconds if it trades stably. And on the other hand, we've seen examples where if people aren't sure whether -- if it was trading at $100.50 and they thought it might come back to $100, they might put in a limit order and wait for 4 days, and so if your bank told you that when you actually take money out of the bank, they might just arbitrarily only give you 99% of your money and keep 1%, you'd be very angry. And if they said, well, on certain days, you might actually be able to get it all. And on random days, you might get 1% more than the money in the bank. And so that would drive everybody insane if you randomly got plus or minus 1% of what you thought you should get. And so the primary value added of the company, right, the thing that -- the reason that we're here is to strip the volatility of the instrument and extract the yield. And so if I use an example of like standard oil, like, okay, I have a barrel of crude oil and I create kerosene and the real -- the reason it was called standard was because it was the kerosene that didn't blow up in your face. And so if someone came along and said, like 1 out of 100 gallons of the kerosene blows up in people's faces. And should we just go ahead and ship that one, and then we'll put a little disclaimer on the can that says, you need to test this before you use it. It's like, people would say, that's not a good business. It's not 1% less good. It's like 100x less good. So what we're doing is creating the very best credit we can create. And in this particular case, I think the value proposition to the investor is the company is going to create liquidity around par as much as you need. If you wanted to buy $1 billion of this, we're not going to make you pay $110 a share. We're going to sell it to you at $100.01 or $100. So that's a value, and that would cause someone to come in. And on the other hand, somebody wants to know that if they sold at $100, they didn't make a mistake. And also, if this thing falls below par and it falls to $95 or $90, the company is going to use all of its resources to bring it back to the trading range and to bring it back to par, right? That's what we're going to do. And so if we're ambiguous or unclear about that, then we have broken the promise, right? We have undermined the value proposition of the instrument. The instrument is to be the lowest volatility, highest liquidity, most predictable credit instrument in the digital credit market, right? We -- and we want to create the best credit instrument we can possibly create. And so allowing it to flex and rattle around is an abrogation of that responsibility I'll make one more point. The people that say that, sometimes they say, well, you should do that because that's like bad for the shorts. Like if you let it float up to $101 or $102 or $103, people won't want to short it. We're putting the interest of the $10 billion of credit investors ahead of the interest of the $300 million of short investors. The point is run this program to the benefit of the people that buy the credit and hold the credit as opposed to worry about the short sellers. Our view is even if someone shorted STRC at $100, that's good for us, like we welcome that. And because if someone wants to come in the market and pay 12% dividend to create liquidity and then they're going to put their balance sheet and post their balance sheet to build digital credit. We actually think that's good for the ecosystem. So we're not trying to discourage short selling. If someone wants to short $10 billion of this thing when it hits $100 billion, then we will have $10 billion of credit and someone else will be paying 12% interest on their $10 billion. And so you can see someone else will be paying $1.2 billion of dividends to make STRC a $20 billion AUM instrument. So we just don't see a logical reason why you wouldn't run a very disciplined program to strip the maximum amount of volatility off the instrument. That's what -- that is consistent with the highest liquidity. And since that's the highest liquidity, that makes it the best credit instrument. And if it's the best credit instrument, then the demand is going to be higher. Everybody wants the best thing. And then if the demand is higher, that's good for the common stock and it's good for the company and it's good for everybody else. So we're going to create the best possible product we can create. And we're not going to worry about how someone might view it if they're a short seller one way or the other. By the way, Natalie, if somebody really wants a product that will trade between $95 and $105, we have one. It's called STRF. What I wouldn't -- by the way, it's actually less risky. It's more collateralized, it's longer duration. If you're a long-duration credit investor and you want something that might trade above $100, then I would encourage everyone to buy STRF because it was designed to literally do that. And what you'll see is if you look at it is the demand and liquidity for it is 20x less than STRC. So if people are wondering what would happen if the company let STRC trade like STRF, what would happen is the demand for the instrument would fall by an order of magnitude and the liquidity would collapse. And when that happened, confidence would collapse. So in my opinion, it's not a good idea to let the instrument float randomly around.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeAll right. Thanks so much for that, Michael. We have about 10 minutes left. I'm going to try to get through as many questions I know a lot are still coming in. So if we can keep the answers a little bit more concise just so we can get through a couple. Starting with Osama and Eric both asked, Michael previously suggested that Bitcoin could reach $1 million per coin if Strategy accumulated 5% of the total Bitcoin supply and potentially $10 million a coin at 7%. Have your long-term price expectations and assumptions evolved given that the price is lower now than in November 2021 when Strategy owned about 120,000 Bitcoin?
Michael Saylor
executiveWe don't have a precise forecast for when those prices get hit. We know directionally that the more Bitcoin we buy, the better it is for Bitcoin. We're in the middle of a bear market right now. So things are a bit harder and the going is a bit tougher. But we will continue to acquire Bitcoin. And we think, again, if you're a short-term price predictor or a trader, I don't really have much useful wisdom for you. My advice is don't invest in Bitcoin unless you're going to hold it for more than 4 years, ideally hold it for 10 years. And what we think is the more Bitcoin we buy, the higher the price will go. And we remain bullish on the asset over time.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeThis question is from William. Phong, maybe you can take this one. Frontier AI models have identified security vulnerabilities in many kinds of software systems. How is the company thinking about this threat with respect to Bitcoin custody? And what are you doing about it?
Phong Le
executiveI'll start with we custody with three of the largest institutional grade custodians in the world. And we sit down with them all on a regular basis and go through what are some of their security measures that they have in place. Both related to their software and their hardware related to their personnel and their automation. And by the way, these are the same custodians that custody most of the Bitcoin ETFs in the world. So they're evaluated by a lot of folks. We have advocated for all of them and just the open source Bitcoin community in general have access to different tier models. Some of them do, and they do run their frontier models against some of their software. We're starting to do that, too. So I'd say, rest assured, Bitcoin security and custody is probably the most important thing beyond our Bitcoin capital planning in the company and we take it pretty seriously. And I'm sure some have seen, we've also become part of the Bitcoin Security Consortium, which puts together some of the largest Bitcoin custodians, issuers, exchanges, holders, banks in the world, and we're working together with them to and taking sort of the strength of all of our institutions to work on this together.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeThis question is from Jim. It's directed to you, Michael. Did you ever believe in Bitcoin's ethos of separating money from state regardless of how long that takes? And could you pay dividends in Bitcoin rather than the U.S. dollar?
Michael Saylor
executiveWell, I think Bitcoin is valuable because it's a nonsovereign store of value, just like gold. And so it does -- it separates capital, it separates money from state. And the larger it gets, the greater portion of the global capital is sitting in a nonsovereign digital asset. So that's why we're enthusiastic. We don't have any plans to pay a Bitcoin dividend. We think that the wise trade -- given the fact that 99.9% of the money in the world is in fiat and 0.1% of the money in the world is in Bitcoin, the smart trade is to sell credit and pay the dividend in fiat currency and to buy BTC. BTC is appreciating 30% a year, and we expect it will always appreciate, say, faster than the S&P Index, the credit rates are all much, much lower. And so we would rather pay 10 and collect 30. If we were to pay a Bitcoin dividend, we would be paying 30 to collect 10. So the problem with paying Bitcoin dividends is your cost of capital becomes the strongest money. It's kind of like agreeing to pay 30% yield and then investing in a bond from a country that pays you 4%. And so it's kind of a -- if you get the trade that direction, it's the wrong direction, you'll go bankrupt. And so I don't recommend it to anybody. The right thing to do is to borrow money in dollars or yen and to invest it in BTC. And that way, you're capturing the spread in the right direction. And of course, there's 1,000x more money to borrow in yen and dollars than there is money to borrow in BTC. So it just -- it makes sense to issue fiat credit instruments and buy digital assets like BTC. The opposite direction doesn't really make economic or financial sense.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeRight. This question is from Anthony. Earlier this year, there were advertising campaigns for STRC on X created using AI. Some of the advertisements included the retired engineer lady on the Beach Resort, that This is Spinal Tap parody and a mockup of some traders discussing STRC. What were the results of the advertising campaign? And is the strategy satisfied with the results?
Phong Le
executiveWell, some of the results were the number of views that we looked at click-through rates, people who came to our website, dwell time on our websites. So if you look at those as metrics, they're all quite positive. And I do think it led to greater retail adoption of stretch. So -- and look, just using AI and discovering all the capabilities ahead was fun, and it created a narrative. So I think overall, I was fairly satisfied with the results of the campaign. That said, if we think that institutions are a greater target for STRC, then I don't think those advertisements are really getting to the -- causing them to buy the instruments. It makes them aware.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeAll right. I know a lot of people are always on the watch for your upcoming AI videos, Michael. We're going to end this with a little bit of a lighter note. We got a question from Jay asking what you guys do to unwind? Do you play video games? Do you play sports or have any hobbies that you can share? Have a great day from Jay.
Michael Saylor
executiveWe create and post AI videos promoting Bitcoin, in different languages lately. That's been the most fun. Me speaking Korean, Japanese, Italian and French.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeThat's right. And I think I heard you say on a show, Michael, or during an interview that a picture can say 1,000 words, right? And these images sometimes reach more people than, say, a quarterly earnings call or a book, for example, right? You can reach a lot of people and not even necessarily have to say anything, the video or the photo speaks for itself.
Phong Le
executiveI do some fun things, Natalie. I know Mike just only works, but I do some fun things. I have 3 kids, a wife that I love to spend time with and travel with. I play basketball. I love to cook, as you know. And I do play video games and watch mindless shows from time to time, but I'm pretty -- I try to be pretty fastidious about protecting my time from doing things that don't create much value.
Natalie Brunell
attendeeGuard your time. That's one of your 10 pieces of advice, Michael. That brings us right to the end of our Q&A session. Michael and Phong, thank you so much both for sitting in the hot seat and taking the questions. Thank you to everyone who submitted one. We received far more than we could possibly get through today. So hopefully, we'll have another Q&A session soon, and we really appreciate everyone who took the time to participate. If you did miss any part of the conversation, again, the full replay will be available on Strategy's account, and I will also be airing it on the Coin Stories podcast. So Michael, Phong, thank you so much. Thank you to everyone for watching and listening. I'm Natalie Brunell. Please check out my book Bitcoin is For Everyone, and take care. We'll see you next time.
Phong Le
executiveThanks, Natalie. Thanks, everyone.
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