The Bitcoin Beacon
With corporate demand near zero, one firm is testing whether a 13% daily-dividend preferred can fund a bitcoin buy every day.
UNITED STATES — Corporate bitcoin buying has gone quiet. Across the listed companies that spent two years turning cash and fresh equity into bitcoin, net treasury demand has fallen close to zero as the price hovers near $77,000 and the premium that once made the trade self-financing has thinned. Strive did not get the memo.
The asset manager, run by Matt Cole, funded another bitcoin purchase on September 1 — about 104 coins — the ninth straight business day it had done so. The money did not come from a bond sale or a cash pile. It came from a preferred stock.
Strive’s Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Preferred, ticker SATA, carries a $100 par value and pays a roughly 13% annualized dividend that, since June 2026, is distributed in daily installments. When the stock trades near par, Strive can issue it, take in cash, and turn that cash into bitcoin the same week — a steady drip rather than a lump-sum raise.
Cole has called SATA a rare instrument in U.S. markets, and its design is the point: it lets the company keep buying in small, repeatable increments whether or not the equity market is in the mood for a large offering. The scale has added up. In late August, Strive bought 1,800 BTC between the 24th and 28th at an average of $79,431, lifting its holdings to about 23,156 coins and moving it past Bullish into fifth place among public corporate holders — behind Strategy, Twenty One Capital, Metaplanet and MARA.
What makes this worth watching is the backdrop. The treasury flywheel — issue stock above the value of the coins it buys, purchase bitcoin, watch the stock rise, issue again — has stalled for most of the field. Several treasuries now trade near or below the value of the bitcoin they hold, which kills the premium that made new issuance accretive. Most have simply stopped buying.
The easy phase — premium-funded and self-reinforcing — is over.
Strive is a live experiment in whether preferred-equity financing can keep the buying going when the flywheel stops. The company carries no long-term corporate debt, which removes the forced-seller risk that haunts leveraged treasuries in a downturn: no loan to call, no margin to meet. The dividend is an obligation, but a suspendable one in extremis, not a maturity.
The bear case is straightforward. A 13% daily-pay dividend is expensive money, and it works only as long as SATA trades near par and bitcoin roughly holds its ground. If the preferred slips well below $100, the financing tightens exactly when the company would most want to buy. A perpetual with a rich coupon is a bet that bitcoin’s long-run appreciation outruns the cost of carry — and for now, that bet is one of the few corporate bids still visible on quiet days.
Why it matters: the easy phase of corporate bitcoin buying is over; what keeps working from here will look more like Strive’s daily grind than the headline raises of 2025.
Holdings and dividend terms per company disclosures and reporting as of September 7, 2026. Informational only — not financial advice.
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