Strategy buys no bitcoin and spends $205 million on its STRC preferred as Bitmine resumes share buybacks

Strategy bought no bitcoin between 19 and 25 October 2026. It spent $204.9 million on an STRC buyback instead, repurchasing 2,068,459 shares of its preferred stock, according to an 8-K filed with the SEC on Monday 26 October. The same day Bitmine Immersion Technologies, the largest corporate holder of ether, said it had bought back 2.04 million of its own common shares in the past week while adding 10,452 ETH.

Bitmine’s headline number, $399.6 million, is easy to misread. It is the total the company has spent on buybacks in 2026 to date, over 22.9 million shares, not the amount spent last week. Last week’s repurchase came to about $45.9 million (2.04 million shares at an average $22.48, our multiplication).

So two of the best-known crypto treasury companies put a week of cash into their own securities, instead of coins in Strategy’s case and next to them in Bitmine’s. The third large filer of the day went the other way. Strive reported 6,182 bitcoin bought in the week to 23 October, after selling a new 15% preferred stock.

What links the three moves is the model these companies sold to investors: sell stock for more than the coins behind it are worth, buy coins, repeat. When that premium shrinks, buying back paper can look better than buying coins.

Strategy STRC buyback: $204.9 million, no bitcoin, no share sales

Strategy “did not sell any shares under its at-the-market offering program and did not purchase or sell any bitcoin” in the seven days to 25 October, the filing says. The only transaction reported is the STRC repurchase, paid with $204.9 million of what the company calls USD Cash.

That works out to about $99.06 per STRC share on average (our calculation; the filing gives the total, not the price or the days of the trades). STRC is Strategy’s variable-rate perpetual preferred, with a $100 stated amount and a dividend rate the company sets month by month: 12% a year in October, and 12% again proposed for November in an 8-K of 16 October.

What was bought back matters. This is preferred stock, which Strategy markets as “digital credit”, not MSTR common stock. The company also has a $1.0 billion authorisation to repurchase MSTR shares, and the filing shows the full $1.0 billion still available: none of it has been used. After this week, $956.8 million remains under the separate programme for preferred securities. No STRF, STRK or STRD shares were repurchased.

Holdings did not move. Strategy still owns about 848,517 BTC, bought for an aggregate $64.02 billion, or about $75,446 per coin including fees, the filing says. With bitcoin near $80,270 at 17:21 UTC on Monday, on the market data Coindaro uses, those coins were worth roughly $68.1 billion, about 6% above their cost (our calculation).

Two weeks, almost $400 million into STRC

The week before was already lopsided. In its 8-K of 19 October, covering 12 to 18 October, Strategy reported 267 BTC bought for $22.1 million, at about $82,900 each, funded by selling 140,872 MSTR shares for $22.0 million net. In the same week it repurchased 1,938,780 STRC shares for $193.1 million from USD Cash, and the board raised the ceiling of the preferred buyback programme from $2.0 billion to $3.0 billion.

Added together, the two filings give about $398.0 million spent on 4,007,239 STRC shares in a fortnight, against $22.1 million on bitcoin.

The trend is older than that. On 13 October we reported that Strategy was spending more on STRC buybacks than on bitcoin, after two weeks of 334 and 250 BTC bought against $176.3 million and $192.4 million of STRC repurchased. Nor is a week without bitcoin a first. The Block reported on 17 August that Strategy neither bought nor sold bitcoin from 10 to 16 August, and the week before it had sold 1,690 BTC to help fund STRC repurchases. What is new is that the bitcoin line went to zero in the week of the largest STRC buyback of the last four.

Strategy’s USD Cash covers about one more week at this pace

USD Cash fell from $447.3 million on 18 October to $242.4 million on 25 October, exactly the $204.9 million spent on STRC. The much larger USD Reserve was unchanged at $4.83 billion.

The Reserve is not meant for buybacks. The filing describes it as intended to support dividends on the preferred stock and interest on the debt, and the 19 October filing shows it paid $45.5 million of preferred dividends that week. So the cash that funded two weeks of STRC repurchases would cover a little more than one more week at the latest pace.

That is our arithmetic, not a company forecast. Strategy could refill USD Cash by selling MSTR shares through its at-the-market programme, as it did the week before, or by selling bitcoin, as it did in early August. It could also simply buy back less. The filing gives no hint.

The buybacks have had a visible effect on the price they target. STRC closed at $99.36 on Friday 23 October and traded at $99.57 at 17:38 UTC on Monday, on Yahoo Finance data. Ten days earlier it had closed at $97.72, when we reported that STRC fell below its buyback band as MSTR dropped 9.6%. It is close to its $100 par again but not there: according to Bitcoin.com News, STRC has not traded at or above $100 since May.

Bitmine buys back its own stock again, next to its ether

Bitmine’s weekly release gives its holdings as of 25 October at 2:00 pm ET (18:00 UTC): 6,051,933 ETH, valued at $2,356 each, which the company says is 4.95% of the 122.2 million ETH in existence. It bought 10,452 ETH over the week, about $24.6 million at the release’s price (our calculation).

The buyback is the new part. The release says Bitmine bought back 2.04 million shares in the past week, “repurchased at an average price of $22.48.” These are common shares, unlike Strategy’s preferred, so each one retired raises the amount of ether behind every remaining BMNR share.

The company adds that when management believes its shares are “relatively undervalued”, it “intends to accretively repurchase shares”, subject to market conditions and under its existing authorisation. The release does not give the size of that authorisation. According to cryptonews.net, the last buyback before this one was on 17 August, roughly ten weeks ago.

$399.6 million is the 2026 total, not last week’s spending

The bigger figure needs care. “In 2026, Bitmine has repurchased 22.9 million common shares, at an average price of $17.48,” the release says, for $399.6 million in all. That is a year-to-date total. The latest week accounts for about $45.9 million of it.

Bitmine calls the programme “the largest crypto treasury company common equity buyback ever executed”. That is the company’s claim, which we have not checked against every peer. The word “common” matters: Strategy’s preferred repurchases over the last four weeks alone come to $766.7 million (our sum of four 8-Ks).

Ether buying has not stopped. The release says Bitmine has bought ETH every week since its treasury strategy began on 30 June 2025, and calls itself “99% of the way” to its goal of owning 5% of the supply. Five percent of 122.2 million is 6.11 million ETH, so the gap is about 58,000 ETH (our calculation). In our report of 19 October, Bitmine held 6.04 million ETH and was about 65,000 short.

Chairman Tom Lee blamed the market for the latest drop. “Crypto got pulled down by the same ‘risk off’ forces behind the AI sell-off,” he said in the release, noting that ETH is 13% below its recent peak while the SOXX semiconductor index is down 20% over the same period.

Strive keeps buying: 6,182 bitcoin funded by a 15% preferred

Strive, the asset manager turned bitcoin treasury company, filed its own 8-K on 26 October. Between 17 and 23 October it “purchased 6,182 bitcoin at an average price of approximately $82,732 per bitcoin, inclusive of fees and expenses”. That is about $511.4 million (our multiplication; the filing gives no total), in line with the $511.4 million reported by Bitcoin Magazine and the roughly $511 million given by The Block. Holdings reached 43,000 BTC on 23 October, up from 36,818 reported a week earlier.

The filing does not say how the purchase was paid for. The timing points to the SATS preferred: Strive closed the sale of 7 million shares of its 15% SATS perpetual preferred at $90 on 20 October, for about $630 million before expenses, as The Block reported, and the 8-K now shows 7,000,000 SATS shares outstanding where there were none on 16 October. Our report on the offering explains what a 16.7% yield on SATS really means for buyers at $90.

Strive wants more. A second 8-K filed the same day sets up a sales agreement to sell up to $1.0 billion of SATS stock over time, through seven agents led by Cantor Fitzgerald and Barclays, with commissions of up to 2.0%. The company is under no obligation to sell any.

One line in the Strive filing ties the two stories together. Strive reports 505,000 shares of STRC among its assets, worth $50.2 million on 23 October, next to $504.4 million of cash; together they make the $554.6 million of cash and securities cited by Bitcoin Magazine. So Strive holds some of the very preferred that Strategy is buying back.

The contrast is our reading, not something either company says. Strategy is using cash to retire a preferred that costs it 12% a year. Strive is issuing a preferred that pays 15% on its stated amount to buy more bitcoin, at an average price above where bitcoin traded on Monday afternoon.

The week in figures

The table sets the three companies’ Monday filings side by side. Share prices are Yahoo Finance quotes at 17:40 UTC on 26 October; per-share and dollar figures marked as ours are our calculations from the filings.

Do the shares trade below their coins?

Here the numbers are least solid. Investors watch a ratio called mNAV: the market value of a treasury company divided by the value of the coins it holds. Above 1, the market pays a premium, and selling new shares buys more coins per existing share. Below 1, issuing stock to buy coins dilutes holders, and buying back stock does the reverse.

None of Monday’s three documents gives an mNAV, and the trackers that publish one for Strategy use different methods, so their readings are not comparable. The last figure we could check is from June: CryptoQuant analyst Axel Adler Jr. put Strategy’s mNAV at 0.99, below 1 for the first time in its history, in a note reported by Stocktwits on 28 June.

The answer depends on the definition. At a bitcoin price near $80,000, Strategy’s 848,517 BTC are worth roughly $68 billion (Coindaro’s own multiplication, not a published figure). The simplest version of mNAV sets the market value of MSTR common stock against that sum; enterprise-value versions add the debt and the preferred stock, which pushes the ratio up. Which reading applies on Monday is exactly what the trackers disagree on.

For Bitmine we do not publish a ratio. The release gives no share count, and the figures available online vary too widely to compute one we would stand behind. The company’s own behaviour is the clearest signal: it bought back stock at $22.48 while saying it acts when it judges the shares “relatively undervalued”. On Monday afternoon BMNR traded at $21.39, below that average.

Stocks fell more than bitcoin on Monday

Bitcoin was down 0.55% over 24 hours at 17:21 UTC, near $80,270, and ether down 1.41% near $2,324, on Coindaro’s market data. The three stocks fell further: MSTR by 3.1%, BMNR by 4.5% and ASST by 5.3% at 17:40 UTC. STRC edged up 0.2%.

No filing explains the moves. MSTR fell on the day Strategy disclosed a week without bitcoin; Lee, for his part, ties the crypto drop to the sell-off in AI-related stocks. We report the order of events, not a cause.

There is a further pressure on the two biggest names. MSCI has adopted a rule that would make companies it classes as non-operating ineligible for its global indexes from the close of 30 November, as we reported in our piece on the MSCI rule that could drop Strategy and Metaplanet. Exclusion could cut demand for the shares from funds that track those indexes.

What it changes for bitcoin and ether demand

For several years, Strategy’s Monday filing was one of the most watched sources of new bitcoin demand. A week of zero, after weeks of a few hundred coins, means that demand now depends more on spot ETFs and on newer buyers such as Strive, whose 6,182 BTC in a week was more than seven times Strategy’s total for October so far (851 BTC, our sum of its October 8-Ks).

For ether, Bitmine still adds every week, in smaller amounts as it nears 5%, and part of its cash now goes to its own shares. Neither company has said it will sell coins to fund buybacks this time, though Strategy did exactly that in early August, when it sold 1,690 BTC for about $108.6 million to pay for STRC repurchases, The Block reported.

MSTR, STRC, BMNR, ASST and SATS are US-listed securities registered with the SEC, not crypto-assets: in Europe they fall under securities law, not MiCA. Buying them means buying a company, with its debt and its preferred holders, and their price can move apart from the coins it owns, as it did this week.

Dates to watch: FOMC on 28 October, Strategy results on 29 October

The Federal Reserve announces its rate decision on Wednesday 28 October. The same day, Strategy shareholders vote at a special meeting on amendments that would move STRC to daily dividends from November, according to the company’s 8-K of 16 October.

Strategy has scheduled its third-quarter results for after the US market close on Thursday 29 October, according to an announcement dated 8 October on its website. One figure is already out: in its 8-K of 5 October the company estimated a $20.91 billion gain on its digital assets for the three months to 30 September.

The next weekly filings from Strategy, Bitmine and Strive are due on Monday 2 November. Three numbers will say whether this week was a pause or a turn: Strategy’s bitcoin line, its USD Cash balance after another week of STRC buybacks, and how much SATS Strive manages to sell through its new $1.0 billion programme.