They’re Paying People to Buy Bitcoin: STRC Is the New Fuel for the Accumulation Engine
The Bitcoin-buying spectacle: preferred stock takes the wheel
Quick recap — the firm known for gobbling up Bitcoin went from holding about 672,500 BTC at the end of 2025 to roughly 738,731 BTC as of March 8. That’s an extra 66,231 coins in just 68 days. If you blinked, you might have missed a whale-sized purchase spree.
What’s different this time is not the appetite for Bitcoin but where the cash is coming from. Rather than relying mainly on its ordinary shares and convertible notes like before, the company has leaned hard into a perpetual preferred stock product called STRC. It pays an eye-popping annual dividend of 11.50% and is meant to trade close to its $100 face value — basically a yield-hungry magnet.
In the week through March 8 the firm sold about 3.78 million STRC shares and pulled in roughly $377 million after fees. That week’s at-the-market fundraising totaled about $1.28 billion, and STRC made up roughly a third of that. Even on a shaky BTC week — geopolitical jitters and all — the preferred stock kept pouring money in. On March 9 there was a record STRC issuance that alone could have funded roughly 1,420 BTC. Since STRC launched, it’s been responsible for funding tens of thousands of coins — the running tally is around 33,976 BTC, worth north of $3.5 billion.
Why does this matter? Preferred issuance lets the company reach a different pool of investors — income and yield-seeking funds that might not touch the common shares. Big ETFs and income funds have shown up on the cap table, and some corporate treasuries have even parked cash there. To make it easier to keep the tap flowing, the firm amended its sales agreement so multiple agents can sell the same class of securities across pre-market, regular, and after-hours sessions. In plain English: more ways to sell, more ways to buy Bitcoin fast.
The sexy yield… and the wallet ache
The yield is the headline: 11.50% is hard to ignore if you’re hunting for income. Comparisons have been made to other perpetual preferreds — one example being a legacy bank product yielding roughly half of STRC and trading at a fraction of the volume. STRC saw daily volumes in the hundreds of millions in some stretches, which is insane for a preferred security and shows how many investors are chasing carry.
But this tasty yield has a cost. There’s about $3.84 billion of STRC outstanding. At 11.50%, that’s about $442 million in dividends per year — roughly $36.8 million out the door every month. The company is effectively paying a pricey subscription to keep the Bitcoin buying conveyor belt running.
That trade-off has critics. Some argue the firm is burning cash to feed its accumulation strategy and will eventually have to pick between cutting the dividend or selling Bitcoin to make payments. Others point out that calling the securities “digital credit” is just marketing — the obligations are fiat-denominated and sticky regardless of the crypto collateral.
There’s a two-scenario logic here. If Bitcoin keeps climbing and investors keep buying STRC, the math looks brilliant: gains on BTC can dwarf financing costs. If BTC slips and preferred demand cools, the company may have to offer even higher yields to attract buyers, making the cost side fatter relative to what’s being purchased.
For now, the market seems ambivalent: the firm’s regular shares have held up better than Bitcoin year-to-date, which helps keep equity fundraising usable when needed. But preferred issuance is clearly playing a much larger role in the capital stack, and the coming months will tell whether that high-yield strategy is genius-level capital engineering or a slow-motion headache.
Either way, it’s one of the more entertaining finance experiments out there: pay people a juicy coupon, print money in the form of coins, and hope the coins appreciate more than the coupons cost. Grab your popcorn.
