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Michael Saylor spent years telling anyone who would listen that Bitcoin was the ultimate store of value and that selling it would be like “selling Manhattan in the 1800s.”
Strategy, the company formerly known as MicroStrategy, is sitting on an unrealized loss of approximately $10 billion across its massive Bitcoin position. The firm holds 840,447 BTC purchased at an average cost of roughly $75,482 per coin, totaling around $64 billion in cumulative spending. With Bitcoin trading in the low-to-mid $64,000 range as of August 2026, those holdings are worth approximately $54 billion.
The numbers behind the hole
Strategy’s average purchase price of approximately $75,482 per Bitcoin means the company needs a roughly 18% rally from current levels just to break even.
The more telling development is what Strategy has been doing with its holdings. In July 2026, the company sold 3,588 BTC for $216 million. It followed that up with additional sales of approximately 1,690 BTC in early August. These are modest amounts relative to an 840,000-coin stockpile, barely a rounding error. But for a company that built its entire identity around never selling Bitcoin, any sale at all is significant.
How Strategy got here
The company’s Bitcoin journey began in 2020, when Saylor, then CEO of a mid-sized business intelligence software company, decided to park the firm’s treasury reserves in Bitcoin. Strategy didn’t just hold its early gains. It kept buying, using a combination of equity offerings and debt issuances to fund increasingly larger purchases. The company effectively transformed from a software firm into a leveraged Bitcoin vehicle.
In February 2025, the company rebranded from MicroStrategy to simply “Strategy.” By that point, the software business was almost an afterthought. The company’s valuation, its stock price movements, and its reason for existing all revolved around one asset.
What the selling signals
The July and August sales are small in absolute terms, but they carry outsized symbolic weight. Saylor and Strategy had previously maintained an explicit policy of accumulation only.
Strategy remains the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin by a wide margin. The firm has weathered paper losses before, notably during the 2022 bear market when Bitcoin fell below $16,000. The difference this time is that Strategy’s position is dramatically larger than it was in 2022, the average cost basis is higher, and the company has started doing the one thing it always said it wouldn’t do.
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