Strategy Sells Bitcoin Below Cost Basis to Fund Dividends

Published by James Harris on July 6, 2026July 6, 2026

Strategy sold Bitcoin for the first time in memory, not to rotate capital or rebalance a position, but to pay dividends. That distinction matters more than the size of the sale.

The company offloaded 3,588 BTC across two tranches between June 29 and July 5, 2026, raising $216 million at average prices well below its cost basis. Its average purchase price across the full reserve sits at roughly $75,476 per BTC; it sold these coins at $59,256 and $60,773 respectively. That is not a strategic exit. It is a treasury operation under pressure, one that reveals how the preferred stock and debt instruments Strategy used to accumulate Bitcoin now impose real cash obligations regardless of where the market trades. The structure that made the accumulation possible is now dictating the liquidation schedule.

Strategy also announced a BTC Monetization Program on June 29, which could raise up to an additional $1.25 billion for its USD reserve. As of July 5, none of that capacity had been used, meaning the sales disclosed here represent only the beginning of what the program permits.

The Accounting Picture Is Harder to Ignore

For the quarter ending June 30, Strategy reported an $8.32 billion loss on digital assets, almost entirely unrealized, with its holdings carried at $49.67 billion against a cost basis that now exceeds fair value. That gap triggered a valuation allowance against the deferred tax benefit tied to the unrealized loss, which will be fully offset. The numbers were prepared by management and were neither audited nor reviewed by KPMG. That disclosure, buried in an SEC filing, is the kind of detail that institutional counterparties read carefully when evaluating exposure to a company whose balance sheet is essentially a leveraged Bitcoin position.

The broader implication here is structural. Strategy now holds 843,775 BTC with a USD reserve of $2.55 billion explicitly earmarked for servicing preferred dividends and loan interest. If Bitcoin continues trading below the company’s average cost basis, the pressure to sell into weakness rather than strength does not go away. Other firms watching the Strategy model as a template for corporate Bitcoin adoption are now watching something else: what happens when the financing instruments mature into obligations and the asset is underwater. The protocol-level risks that burned DeFi treasuries in 2022, where yield-generating positions collapsed precisely when liquidity was needed, have a corporate analog here. Separately, the week’s reminder that smart contract infrastructure can carry hidden liabilities, as seen in the Aztec exploit that drained roughly $4.3 million from abandoned code, applies equally to any structure where obligations and assets are assumed to be in balance until they are not.

Bitcoin was trading around $60,000 at the time of the filing, leaving Strategy’s entire reserve position in unrealized loss territory against its blended cost basis of $75,476 per coin.