Crypto Treasuries Chase A New Kind Of Capital

There is a peculiar irony at the heart of the crypto treasury movement. Companies that staked their futures on digital assets as a revolutionary store of value are now reaching deep into the oldest toolkit in traditional finance to stay relevant. The instrument they have landed on is perpetual preferred stock, a hybrid of debt and equity that its most vocal proponents are branding "digital credit." It is spreading from Wall Street to London to Paris, carried by the same evangelistic energy that has always surrounded bitcoin culture, and it raises questions that the market has not yet fully resolved.

The story begins, as so many do in this space, with Michael Saylor.

His company, Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, is today the world's largest corporate holder of bitcoin, sitting on approximately 818,000 BTC valued at around $63.7 billion. It pioneered the bitcoin treasury concept and, in doing so, inspired hundreds of companies globally to follow suit. The results, for a great many of them, have been painful. Bitcoin is currently trading around $62,500, down roughly 27 per cent since the start of this year and well below last summer's highs. The broader category of crypto treasury stocks has been under sustained pressure throughout 2026, with purchases by bitcoin treasury companies having declined 99 per cent from their August 2025 peak, according to data from CryptoQuant. Several companies that joined the gold rush have already been forced to liquidate their holdings and return, quietly, to whatever original business they started with.

Into this environment, Saylor has introduced what he calls digital credit. The product at Strategy goes by the name STRC, also referred to as Stretch. It is a perpetual preferred stock that pays holders an annual dividend of 11.5 per cent, distributed monthly, with no maturity date and no obligation for the company ever to buy the shares back. There is no equity upside connected to Strategy's common stock, and no direct link to the price of bitcoin. What investors receive is a high-yield income stream, funded by Strategy's ongoing capital raising, which in turn finances further bitcoin purchases. The mechanics are straightforward; the sustainability question is rather less so.

The numbers are, by any measure, large. STRC has attracted more than $10.5 billion since its launch roughly ten months ago, and is reported to be the largest perpetual preferred stock by market capitalisation in the world. Strategy raised over $7.3 billion through equity and preferred offerings in the first quarter of 2026 alone, even as it reported a net loss of $12.54 billion driven by bitcoin fair value losses of $14.46 billion. The company is now proposing to shift from monthly to twice-monthly dividend payments, a move that would tighten the payout cycle considerably. Money to fund those dividends comes from further capital raising, a circular model that critics have pointed to repeatedly, and that Saylor has addressed with characteristic confidence.

Others are watching and learning. In the United States, Strive Asset Management, listed on NASDAQ under the ticker ASST and co-founded by Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and sometime Trump political ally, has launched its own version of digital credit under the ticker SATA. It currently pays investors 13 per cent annually, a rate recently raised, with payouts delivered in daily instalments. Strive's bitcoin treasury has now crossed 15,000 BTC, built primarily through the proceeds of SATA offerings that have attracted demand well in excess of initial targets. In January 2026, a $150 million SATA offering drew more than $600 million in interest, a signal that appetite for high-yield, bitcoin-adjacent instruments remains alive even as the broader market cools.

In Bristol, at a recent bitcoin treasury "unconference," Andrew Webley, chief executive of the Smarter Web Company, a web design business turned crypto treasury firm that listed in London in April 2025, was in no doubt about the significance of what Saylor and Strive have created. "What Strategy pioneered and then Strive has adopted is probably the most significant development in bitcoin capital strategies ever," he told the Financial Times. He then went further: "It's the greatest invention ever." The Smarter Web Company is understood to be considering the launch of its own digital credit product in London, according to people familiar with the matter. The company itself has declined to comment.

Across the Channel, Paris-listed Capital B is equally committed to the approach. Alexandre Laizet, the company's director of bitcoin strategy, has described digital credit as its "full focus," adding that some investors already involved with Strategy's STRC product have expressed interest in what a European equivalent might offer, even at smaller scale. "The best way to maximise bitcoin per share," Laizet has said, "is to deploy the Strategy playbook at European scale." It is a phrase that captures both the genuine ambition and the broadly derivative nature of what most of these companies are now doing.

What digital credit does, in theory at least, is offer these companies a route to fresh capital that does not depend on a rising share price. Investors who want some proximity to bitcoin but cannot absorb the volatility of treasury stocks, and who want income rather than growth, represent a meaningfully different audience from the retail speculators who drove the initial mania. Whether that audience is large enough, and patient enough, to sustain a proliferating market of similar instruments from smaller and less well-known operators is a question the coming months will begin to answer.

What is clear is that the tide has turned on the pure treasury model. Share prices across the sector have fallen sharply, investor sentiment has soured and the easy money of 2024 and 2025 is a distant memory. The companies still standing are those willing to evolve, to reach into the financial toolkit and find new ways to attract capital. Digital credit may not be the greatest invention ever. But in a market that is running low on options, it is, for now, the one that is working.