Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) is what’s known as a bitcoin treasury company. Although their main area of focus used to be IT consulting services, the company pivoted to a focus on accumulating as much bitcoin as possible as quickly as possible in 2020. This is because the company’s executive chairman, Michael Saylor, sees bitcoin as the next global monetary base upon which a new financial system will blossom.
Currently, the company holds around $47 billion worth of bitcoin. And despite the recent price decline from roughly $125,000 in October to around $60,000 last week, Strategy has shown no signs of stopping its purchases. Earlier this week, Strategy announced it was scooping up another $168.4 million worth of the crypto asset. This purchase was funded by the issuance of new shares in the company, which is the main way Strategy has acquired a large portion of its total stack, along with various debt-based options in the past.
Strategy has acquired 2,486 BTC for ~$168.4 million at ~$67,710 per bitcoin. As of 2/16/2026, we hodl 717,131 $BTC acquired for ~$54.52 billion at ~$76,027 per bitcoin. $MSTR $STRC https://t.co/wvxRYZlQ3Y
— Michael Saylor (@saylor) February 17, 2026
According to data from BitcoinTreasuries.NET, Strategy’s bitcoin holdings peaked at a valuation of around $90 billion in early October. Meanwhile, Strategy stock is down about 76.5% from its all-time high of $543, which it hit in November 2024.
Despite some catastrophizing in the media, Strategy is only down around 10% from the total acquisition price of their bitcoin over time. The company has also claimed it could handle a bitcoin price drawdown all the way to $8,000. Wall Street firms Bernstein and TD Cowen also agreed that Strategy is not currently anywhere near troubled waters.
Due to Strategy’s approach, it effectively acts as a leveraged bet on the price of bitcoin, as its underlying goal is to increase the amount of bitcoin associated with each share of stock held in the company. For this reason, Strategy’s stock tends to outperform bitcoin in bull markets and underperform when the crypto asset is falling. Yes, it’s possible that Strategy’s balance sheet could effectively implode in a situation where bitcoin fails to achieve its ultimate goal of becoming a credible global reserve asset and confidence disappears. However, Strategy stock should also outperform the underlying crypto asset when success appears likely.
This sort of asymmetrical bet has also long been associated with bitcoin itself, as its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, once stated, “I’m sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume.”
Strategy has its detractors who call it nothing more than a Ponzi scheme, but people have been making similar claims about bitcoin itself for more than 15 years. That said, it’s certainly true that Strategy comes with a different risk profile than simply buying and holding bitcoin itself.
Strategy has also faced criticism from Bitcoin purists who see the treasury company as a departure from the original vision of the cryptocurrency as a peer-to-peer digital cash system. In fact, there is growing concern regarding the concentration of bitcoin holdings in a number of different centralized entities, including treasury companies like Strategy, crypto exchanges like Coinbase, and exchange-traded fund (ETF) providers like BlackRock. On top of that, Saylor has faced criticism for past alleged comments regarding Zcash-style privacy and his rejection of proof-of-reserves protocols, which some perceive as clashing with cypherpunk ethos.
The crypto industry more generally has also seen increased tension between cypherpunks and tech entrepreneurs, particularly in the area of stablecoins. At various points in time, it has also become clear that crypto infrastructure is much more centralized than it sometimes appears on the surface.
The reality is that entrepreneurs are going to build more user-friendly infrastructure on top of the base Bitcoin protocol, and there isn’t much of anything that can be done to prevent this. That said, while the average person may not be interested in using bitcoin to attain complete financial sovereignty (which has indeed proven problematic in some cases due to increasingly common physical attacks on high-profile holders), any bitcoin user can still run their own full node, maintain self-custody, and use the technology in ways that preserve many of the original value propositions.
It’s possible that notable cypherpunk and Satoshi candidate Hal Finney was right all the way back in 2010, and Bitcoin will eventually evolve into a system of digital banking; however, those who still want to be their own banks will always be able to do so, although that sort of activity may increasingly move to layers above the base Bitcoin blockchain.
For now, the bitcoin reserves held by companies like Strategy and stablecoin-issuer Tether could be viewed as the early emergence of a theoretical bitcoin-based banking system. Of course, there is still plenty of uncertainty around this turning into reality, as indicated by Tether also acquiring a $24 billion stash of physical gold.
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