Shares of Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR ) rose about 9% on Friday as Bitcoin retreated to the $78,000 level.
This move comes just days after Executive Chairman Michael Saylor delivered a headline-grabbing keynote at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas.
MSTR climbed above $180 per stock during Friday’s session, based on an earlier close near $165. The move tracked Bitcoin’s intraday gains, which pushed BTC to $78,961 as of Friday afternoon, according to Bitcoin Magazine Pro data.
The rally is building a welcome reprieve for MSTR investors who have endured a brutal stretch — the stock is still down more than 70% from its November 2024 all-time high above $457.
The price action comes amid a broader rally in Bitcoin, which has surged higher since a sharp pullback to the mid-$60,000s earlier this year. Bitcoin also surged past the $78,000 mark last week, driven by short liquidations and improved macro sentiment following reports of progress in diplomatic talks between the US and Iran.
Polymarket contracts on May 1 BTC pricing showed 100% confidence that the asset would close in the $78,000-$80,000 range.
As a leveraged proxy for Bitcoin, MSTR tends to amplify BTC’s movements in both directions. Strategy currently has approximately 818,334 Bitcoins on its balance sheet – about 3.9% of all Bitcoin that will ever exist – acquired at an average price of about $66,385 per coin.
Saylor: The strategy’s STRC is booming
The stock pop also comes on the heels of fresh enthusiasm generated by Saylor’s keynote at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas last week.
Instead of focusing on Bitcoin price targets or more Bitcoin purchases, Saylor’s pitch centered on STRC — the strategy’s Bitcoin-backed preferred stock — and a sweeping thesis that digital credit is poised to cannibalize trillions of dollars in the old credit market.
“The world’s $300 trillion credit market is a much bigger opportunity than the world’s roughly $2 trillion Bitcoin market, and Strategy has built the first product to bridge the two,” argued Saylor during the keynote.
STRC, which pays an 11.5% monthly variable dividend and trades on the Nasdaq, has grown to about $8.5 billion in nominal value in less than nine months — larger, Saylor argued, than the entire existing universe of monthly-paying preferred securities combined.
“This is going viral,” he told the audience.
BlackRock’s iShares Preferred & Income Securities ETF has already taken a roughly $210 million position in STRC.
Saylor said STRC has funded the acquisition of approximately 77,000 BTC year-to-date in 2026, about ten times the net inflow of all US spot Bitcoin ETFs combined during the same period.