Bitcoin treasury Strategy has halted stacking sats — again.
Just one week after resuming its bitcoin buying following a 10-week hiatus, the Nasdaq-listed company has put its BTC purchases on hold again.
Instead, the firm continued buying back its stock, repurchasing $176 million of STRC and increasing the size of its digital credit securities repurchase program from $1 billion to $2 billion, according to a Tuesday regulatory filing and announcement from founder and chairman Michael Saylor.
The company still holds 845,050 bitcoins worth over $66 billion at today’s prices and $6.5 billion in dollar reserves. The bitcoins were bought at an average price of $63.73 billion, according to Tuesday’s filing.
Strategy shares (NASDAQ: MSTR) were trading more than 3% lower Tuesday morning in New York.
The company paused its bitcoin buys in June, instead focusing on building a cash buffer, buying back its stock and even sometimes selling some of its holdings.
Strategy has defended its bitcoin sales, with CEO Phong Le saying that the company now has a “bullet-proof balance sheet” because of the move, and that it was the “right trade at the time” to sell when it did.
In the company’s quarterly earnings in July, Strategy posted a $8.22 billion loss. But Le reassured investors that the firm’s current paper loss was nothing to worry about.
“We’re the J.P. Morgan of the crypto economy, so whether we sell 1,000 Bitcoin out of 840,000 to me is irrelevant to the conversation,” Le said.
Strategy — formerly MicroStrategy — is an enterprise software company that pivoted to buying and holding bitcoin in 2020.
It first bought the cryptocurrency to protect its shareholders from inflation. Since then, it has aggressively bought the asset and pivoted to being a bitcoin treasury.
Investors can now buy its shares to get heightened exposure to the cryptocurrency, or get paid a yield via its digital credit products.