Bitcoin treasury company Strategy wants to pay investors daily dividends on four of its preferred stocks.
The largest corporate holder of bitcoin said Friday that it was asking shareholders to approve the move, which would pay investors dividends every calendar day — including weekends and holidays — on STRF, STRC, STRK, and STRD.
“If approved and adopted, we believe this would reduce reinvestment lag, enhance liquidity and market efficiency, and increase price stability,” Strategy said in a statement. Stockholders will attend a meeting to vote on the proposal on October 28.
Strategy slowed down with its aggressive bitcoin buys this year, as the largest cryptocurrency fell into a bear market. The Nasdaq-listed company instead focused on protecting its balance sheet and sold chunks of its bitcoin.
Friday’s announcement claimed the move would help both investors and common stockholders.
“We believe these enhancements can also benefit our common stockholders by increasing the attractiveness and utility of our Digital Credit instruments, supporting our ability to access preferred equity capital efficiently and expanding the capital markets toolkit we use to execute our Bitcoin Treasury strategy,” Strategy added in a statement.
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.
The company would buy bitcoin every Monday but slowed down its buys after announcing a program under which it may sell BTC from time to time to generate up to $1.25 billion in proceeds for the USD reserve, additionally fund preferred stock dividends and interest expenses or fund repurchases.
Strategy said in a filing Monday that it last week bought 950 bitcoins for $75.7 million — its first buy since August.
Its Nasdaq-listed stock (MSTR) is down nearly 50% over the past year after the price of bitcoin took a hit.
But since the company started buying bitcoin in 2020, MSTR has appreciated by nearly 1,000%.