Selling 32 BTC for dividend payments: Strategy breaks the vow of "never sell"

Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

On June 1, Strategy filed an 8-K with the SEC, disclosing the sale of 32 Bitcoins between May 26 and May 31, at an average price of $77,135, totaling approximately $2.5 million. After the sale, the company still holds 843,706 BTC, with a total cost basis of $63.87 billion and an average price of $75,699.

The 32 BTC account for 0.004% of the total holdings, and $2.5 million is equivalent to Strategy’s average daily purchase volume over the past 12 months. From a financial perspective, this transaction is almost meaningless. But what it breaks is far greater than the amount realized. Since first buying Bitcoin in August 2020, Strategy has sold only once before—when it sold 704 BTC in December 2022 to cash out $11.8 million at an average price of $16,776, with the goal of tax-loss harvesting, and then repurchased 810 BTC two days later at a lower price. That sale was essentially a tax operation, not a genuine reduction of holdings.

But this time is different. The $2.5 million was explicitly earmarked for paying preferred stock dividends, and Strategy has no intention to buy it back.

Dividend obligations start coming due

Starting in early 2025, Strategy began issuing preferred stock in a concentrated manner: STRK pays 8% annual interest, STRF pays 10%, STRD pays 10%, and STRC pays 11.5%. The four series stack on top of each other, and the company has already paid more than $693 million in dividends to date.

The logic behind these preferred stocks is that investors hand over the money to Strategy, Strategy uses it to buy Bitcoin, and then pays fixed-rate dividends using cash reserves and operating income. When Bitcoin rises, the mNAV premium expands, allowing Strategy to continue rolling forward financing by issuing new shares. When Bitcoin falls or trades sideways, the dividend obligations do not disappear, but the financing window becomes narrower.

MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin accumulation pace

In December 2025, Strategy set up a $2.25 billion cash reserve dedicated to covering dividends and debt repayments. At the pace at the time, it could last about 30 months. But by May 31, 2026, this reserve had already fallen to $900 million, having consumed $1.35 billion over six months.

During the Q1 earnings call, Strategy CEO Phong Le for the first time publicly listed “disciplined sale of bitcoin” as one of the capital management tools. At the time, not many people noticed the phrase, but looking back, it was a prelude to this sale of 32 BTC.

Saylor posted a tweet on February 2, 2025 saying “Never sell your bitcoin.” After the 8-K was disclosed, the tweet was widely retweeted. He later posted again afterward, only discussing the product positioning of STRC, saying Strategy’s goal is to make STRC the best credit instrument in the world, completely sidestepping the topic of selling coins.

On the same day, MSTR’s stock price fell by about 6%. Mizuho maintained a buy rating but lowered its target price from $320 to $265. Most analysts believe the $2.5 million sale does not constitute a material financial impact, but the core significance of the event is at the signal level: if cash reserves continue to be depleted and dividend obligations remain unchanged, future sell sizes may not stop at 32 BTC.

A $100 million word game on Polymarket

Strategy’s selling timing also triggered a prediction market on Polymarket.

The question in this market was whether Strategy would sell Bitcoin before May 31. Total cumulative trading volume exceeded $111 million. The 8-K shows that the trades took place between May 26 and 31, and the time stamp recorded in the filing itself is “4:00 PM Eastern Time on May 31, 2026.” But the 8-K was not submitted to the SEC until June 1, meaning the public only learned of it after the deadline.

Those who bought “Yes” argued that the transaction occurred before the deadline, and that the 8-K written plainly states May 31. Those who bought “No” argued that there was no public information proving the sale occurred before the deadline, and under the rules it should therefore be “No.” After two “No” proposals were challenged, the controversy escalated to UMA token voting arbitration.

Polymarket later added a line of clarification to the page, stating that “consensus from MSTR, on-chain data, or reliable reports has not confirmed that Strategy sold Bitcoin within the time window specified by the market. Confirmation information obtained outside the time window specified by the market does not meet the requirements.”

Behind this dispute is a deeper issue with Polymarket’s arbitration mechanism. A May investigation by The Wall Street Journal found that in most dispute markets on Polymarket, more than half of UMA voting power is concentrated in the 10 largest wallets, about 60% of active voters can be linked to Polymarket accounts, and in roughly one out of every five disputes there is a voter holding both sides’ disputed contract positions. Since 2026, Polymarket has already generated more than 1,150 dispute markets, surpassing the total number for all of 2025.

Not just Strategy selling—Bitcoin drops $72,000

Strategy’s 8-K disclosure came on top of an already weak market environment. On June 1, Bitcoin fell below $72,000, reaching the lowest level since April 13. CoinShares data shows that last week, net outflows from digital asset investment products were $1.67 billion, the second-largest weekly outflow in 2026. For May, Bitcoin spot ETF net outflows totaled $2.3 billion, the largest monthly net outflow this year. Total digital asset management scale has fallen to about $141 billion, the lowest since the start of the year.

Strategy sold 32 BTC, but it is not the first Bitcoin treasury company to take action. Q1 data shows that selling has become a collective behavior. MARA Holdings sold 15,133 BTC between March 4 and March 25, cashing out about $1.1 billion, most of which was used to repurchase convertible bonds maturing in 2030 and 2031. Riot Platforms sold 3,778 BTC in the same period, cashing out $289.5 million; its holdings fell from 19,223 BTC to 15,680 BTC, a reduction of 18%. David Bailey’s Nakamoto Holdings sold 284 BTC in March, accounting for about 5% of its holdings. Empery Digital sold 370 BTC in April to repay loans. Genius Group liquidated its final 84 BTC to repay a $8.5 million debt.

Only MARA, Riot, and Nakamoto combined sold more than 19,000 BTC in Q1. On-chain data from CryptoQuant shows that by the end of March, Bitcoin’s apparent demand dropped to negative 63,000 BTC. This apparent demand (a metric that measures changes in total demand relative to new production) falling into negative territory means the market experienced a deep contraction, with overall selling pressure clearly stronger than buying pressure.

Even some companies didn’t just sell coins—they outright abandoned the treasury model. Forum Markets (formerly ETHZilla) cleared out about $114 million worth of ETH at the start of the year and shifted to tokenization services. VivoPower originally planned to build an XRP treasury, but in February it pivoted to data centers and AI infrastructure, disposing of all XRP holdings in the process.

On May 28, French semiconductor company Sequans Communications confirmed that it had fully repaid its convertible bonds by selling its held Bitcoin, and it also planned to gradually liquidate the remaining 658 BTC. At one point, the company’s Bitcoin holdings peaked at 3,234 BTC.

Sequans previously claimed publicly that it would accumulate and hold more than 3,000 BTC as long-term reserve assets. But so-called “long-term” ultimately turned out to be less than a year. The company’s stock (ticker SQNS) is down 77% year to date, and over the past five years the cumulative decline is as high as 97%.

The business model of Bitcoin treasury companies was validated during the bullish cycle in the second half of 2025. As coin prices rose, the mNAV premium increased. Companies issued new shares or convertible bonds to buy more coins, which further drove up coin prices and premiums, forming a positive feedback loop. After the market topped last October, this flywheel reversed. Falling prices compressed premiums and narrowed the financing window; dividend and debt repayment obligations did not decrease just because coin prices fell, making coin sales the most direct source of liquidity. According to Bitwise, as of the end of Q1, listed companies held about 1.15 million BTC, accounting for 5.47% of total supply. This scale itself creates risk: if multiple treasury companies are forced to reduce holdings within the same time window, they are not only the largest buyers of Bitcoin, but also potentially the most concentrated source of sell pressure.

There are now very few companies still buying. Strive bought about 1,944 BTC in May, spending about $150 million, and Metaplanet bought 5,075 BTC in early April. Strategy itself also kept buying in May; it accumulated more than 25,000 BTC that month, worth more than $2 billion.

Spending $2 billion to buy, while taking out $2.5 million to pay dividends—this ratio indicates that Strategy is still far from a liquidity crisis. But the signal from selling 32 BTC is that even the biggest hoarders are beginning to acknowledge selling as an option in their toolkit.

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