Public companies continued to pile up Bitcoin in June, but the real story of the month played out in a corner of the market that didn’t exist a few years ago: the preferred stocks that treasury companies now use to finance their coin purchases.
A new report from BitcoinTreasuries.net calls June the first true stress test for this “digital credit” market, and the results offer a mixed but telling verdict on where corporate Bitcoin adoption is headed next.
First buy. Public treasuries added close to 9,000 BTC before the June sale, or about 7,300 BTC on a net basis, worth about $427 million to end the month at $58,398. That counts as moderate growth, and two names did most of the work.
Michael Saylor’s strategy added 3,625 BTC net, and Strive added 3,364, with each company spending close to $200 million.
Remove these two and the rest of the field bought about 2,000 BTC. For the entire second quarter, the report estimates 110,000 BTC in net grants, a pace that beat the two quarters before that.
Context matters here. Bitcoin sat well below its October 2025 peak near $126,000 and fell below $60,000 during the month. That backdrop set the stage for the drama in digital credit.
Preferred stocks to burn bitcoin
To understand why that drama matters, it helps to know how the model works. Companies like Strategy are no longer dependent on their own money to buy Bitcoin. They issue preferred shares that promise investors a fixed or variable dividend, sell them near a face value of $100, and convert the proceeds into coins.
Strategy’s flagship product, STRC, and Strive’s version, SATA, became the two largest of these instruments. For a while they traded in a tight band around par, and investors treated them as a place to park money for a healthy dividend.
The quiet risk. As the report explains, long-term near-par leverage built up inside the STRC as buyers borrowed to reinforce the deal. As Bitcoin’s price fell, that leverage became a trigger.
As of June 18, STRC and SATA fell below their $100 par. Leveraged holders got the margin call, forced selling pushed prices down, and STRC bottomed out near $75. SATA weakened from a mixture of its own pressure and spillover from STRC.
This was not a crisis for the underlying yields, which continued to flow, but a crisis of positioning, the report stated.
The recovery came quickly enough to reassure the faithful. On July 2, STRC changed hands near $87 and SATA near $97, prices that held at the report’s July 9 publication. Neither Strategy nor Strive missed a dividend.
The strategy’s bitcoin holdings
The report notes that Strategy held 847,363 BTC at an average price near $75,651 and had a reserve of $1.1 billion in mid-June, while Strive held an 18-month dividend reserve. Pitch: these are cash flow issues, not solvency issues.
The strategy did not sit still. Saylor’s firm rolled out stock and digital credit buybacks, raised STRC dividends and created a dollar reserve, a package meant to stabilize prices while it keeps buying coins. Saylor framed it as a balance between commitment to Bitcoin and the “liquidity, discipline and active capital management” required by the credit strategy.
Since then, Strategy has sold $3,588 and now has 843,775 bitcoin.
The market agreed with the volume. Combined STRC and SATA trading topped $10 billion in June, a monthly record for each, and that was without new market share sales feeding the pipeline. In other words, the demand for the paper did not disappear when the price broke.
BitcoinTreasuries.net polled its readers, an audience it admits leans on digital credit, and found more optimism than fear. A slim majority, 52%, did not see the price drop as a major problem. Most holders sat tight, and 52% of all respondents bought STRC or SATA after June 18.
At the same time, three quarters expect that price fluctuations will repeat themselves, so no one calls the risk away. Looking ahead, 77.8% expect the supply of digital credits to grow by the end of 2027, with around a fifth expecting it to top $50bn.