Nakamoto Inc. Sells 875 Bitcoin to Avoid Margin Call on Kraken Loan
What You Need to Know
- Nakamoto Inc. sold 600 Bitcoin to repay $45 million Kraken loan, reducing holdings to 4,467 BTC.
- Restructured $165 million USDT debt into two tranches extending through mid-2027 at 7.75-8.0% interest rate.
- Loan covenant requires maintaining minimum 2,000 BTC balance, limiting how much Bitcoin company can sell.
- Nakamoto’s $1.9 billion market cap exceeds its $280 million Bitcoin holdings, suggesting investors price in future value.
Nakamoto Inc. quietly sold roughly 600 Bitcoin to pay down a $45 million Kraken loan, then restructured the remaining $165 million USDT debt into two tranches extending through mid-2027. The company now holds about 4,467 BTC, down from 5,342 at year-end 2025, and the reduction happened across multiple rounds, not a single clean transaction.
The pattern here is more telling than any single sale. Nakamoto, Fold Holdings, and even Strategy have all sold Bitcoin into a market sitting roughly 50% below October 2025 highs, which is precisely the dynamic that makes leveraged treasury strategies fragile: the collateral declines in value while the debt obligations remain fixed in dollar terms. Nakamoto’s restructured loan carries an interest rate of 7.75% to 8.0%, contingent on maintaining a minimum 2,000 BTC balance in a Bitwise-managed account, which means the floor on how much Bitcoin the company can actually sell is not zero. That covenant is doing real structural work. The precedent worth reaching for here is not MicroStrategy’s early accumulation phase but its 2022 margin scare, when Saylor’s firm held a Bitcoin-backed loan from Silvergate that required additional collateral as prices fell. The firm survived that episode, but it was a close call that the market had largely forgotten by the time the 2024 bull run began.
A $1.9 billion market cap against roughly $280 million in Bitcoin holdings is a ratio that only makes sense if investors are pricing in something other than the treasury itself.
The December 4, 2026 maturity on the $60 million tranche is the next hard deadline, and if Bitcoin prices remain compressed, Nakamoto will face the same arithmetic again with less room to maneuver. The broader implication for the corporate treasury sector is that the cohort of companies that leveraged into Bitcoin above $100,000 is now functioning as a source of structural selling pressure, not a demand floor. That matters for market structure because these firms were frequently cited as evidence of durable institutional demand. Forced sellers operating under loan covenants are not the same thing as long-term holders.
Nakamoto’s board also authorized a $25 million share repurchase program through December 2026, which, given the company’s current financial position, reads more as a Nasdaq compliance signal than a genuine capital allocation priority.
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