The most revealing number in corporate bitcoin this autumn was not a price. It was a date.
On Monday 28 September, the Bitcoin Treasuries Conference filled Midtown Manhattan with company treasurers, fund allocators and the people who advise them. The organisers said it was at capacity. Adam Back and Ric Edelman opened the day, and Raphael Zagury, who runs Twenty One Capital, closed it. Before most of the room had finished its first coffee, Strategy, the company that made the whole idea famous, had filed its weekly update: another 1,665 bitcoin, bought for $142.7 million at an average of $85,681 a coin.
Perfect timing for a conference. Less tidy when you look back at August.
From Hong Kong to New York
This was the second big stage for the idea in a month. At Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong on 27 and 28 August, the speaker list included Simon Gerovich of Metaplanet, Japan’s best-known bitcoin treasury company, and the organisers confirmed the event will return to the city for a fourth year in 2027. The tone in both cities had shifted. A few years ago, a company buying bitcoin was the headline. Now it is a corporate finance question: how do you pay for it, and what happens when the market stops helping?
That second question is the interesting one, and Strategy answered it in public this summer.
The August sale nobody put on a banner
On 10 August, Strategy sold 1,690 bitcoin at around $64,262 each, raising about $108.6 million, and used the money to buy back some of its preferred shares. Fortune reported it was the company’s fourth bitcoin sale since June, after it said in late June that it could sell up to $1.25 billion of the stuff. Seven weeks later it was buying again, at roughly $21,000 a coin more.
It would have been easy to call that bad timing; this misses the point. The sales were not a bet against bitcoin. They were about obligations. Preferred shares pay dividends, and those dividends have to be paid in dollars, whatever bitcoin happens to be doing that week. That is why Strategy has built a dollar reserve, which stood at $5.02 billion on 27 September. It is sensible housekeeping.
It is also the whole lesson in one line. Conviction decides what you buy. Obligations decide when you sell.
Owning the company is not owning the coin
Strategy now holds 847,666 bitcoin, more than four per cent of the 21 million that will ever exist, at an average cost of $75,437. The next largest public holder, Twenty One Capital, has around 43,500. The numbers are enormous, and it is tempting to treat a share in one of these companies as a neat, wrapped version of the coin.
It isn’t. Buy the share, and you buy the bitcoin, plus a management team, plus preferred shareholders who get paid before you, plus a funding machine that sells new shares to buy more coins. The market’s shorthand for all of that is mNAV, which compares a company’s market value with the value of its bitcoin. Above one, investors pay a premium, and selling new shares to buy bitcoin increases the bitcoin behind each share. Below one, the machine starts to run backwards.
Over the summer, some trackers put Strategy below one on the simplest measure, and the company changed its formula in July. By early September, one tracker had it at about 1.14, with Metaplanet at about 0.97. When two trackers can show the same company at 0.60 and 1.21 on the same day, as happened with Metaplanet this summer, the number is less a fact than an argument.
What it means for ordinary holders
Firstly, corporate buying is real demand, but it is funded demand. It depends on investors being willing to buy the shares that pay for the coins. When the premium shrinks, the buying slows, and in a rough patch it can turn into selling, as August showed.
The second is that no single buyer sets the price, no matter how large. After Monday’s disclosure, bitcoin climbed towards $83,000 and then slipped to around $82,570 within the day. A purchase that looks huge in a headline is a small drop in a very deep pool.
The third travels well beyond crypto. The treasurers in New York spend their days on a question that every household should ask of itself: what do I owe, when is it due, and could I pay it without selling something I love at the worst possible moment? A dollar reserve is just an emergency fund in a better suit. I wrote earlier about stablecoins, the quiet giant of crypto, and the pattern is the same. The plumbing matters more than the poster.
Where I land
I find the treasury story fascinating to watch, and I would rather understand the plumbing than borrow the enthusiasm. If you want the details of this week’s purchase, The Block’s report sets out how it was funded. For my own money, the question I keep coming back to is the one the conference kept circling. Not how much can I own, but what could force my hand. Answer that first and the buying decisions get a calmer.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, and confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for information and education only. It is not financial, investment or professional advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any investment. The Jacqueline Brand is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. The value of investments can fall as well as rise, and past performance is not a guide to future returns. Figures were correct at the time of publication. Always do your own research and consider speaking to a regulated adviser. Where cryptoassets are discussed, they are high risk and largely unregulated in the UK, and you could lose all the money you invest. The Collection
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