Nasdaq Firm Strive Adds 6,182 Bitcoin (BTC) in One Week

From Anti-ESG Asset Manager to 43,000-Coin Treasury

Strive, a Nasdaq-listed asset manager formed in 2022 around opposition to ESG mandates, disclosed on Oct. 26 that it bought 6,182 Bitcoin (BTC) between Oct. 17 and Oct. 23, taking its treasury to 43,000 coins, a position squarely in whale territory. The purchase capped a week in which the company also completed a $630 million offering of SATS perpetual preferred stock and filed a new at-the-market program of up to $1 billion. The Bitcoin (BTC) price drifted lower after the disclosures, COINOTAG's live monitoring shows. SATS sold 7 million shares at $90 each and pays a fixed 15% annual dividend on a $100 nominal value; the companion instrument SATA carries a floating rate, currently 13%. Strive declared the first SATS dividend of $0.8710 per share on Oct. 21, with a Nov. 6 record date and payment due Nov. 9. The prospectus supplement filed Oct. 26 states that a dividend reserve of about $157.5 million was seeded at the offering's close, enough for 18 months of payouts at $22.50 per share, and that the company expects to fund SATS dividends chiefly through new financing, including ATM sales. The company reached the public market through a September 2025 merger with Asset Entities, which brought about $750 million in equity plus up to another $750 million on warrant exercises; its asset-management arm then oversaw more than $2 billion in client assets. Chairman and CEO Matt Cole spent 15 years in CalPERS' global fixed income unit, where he ran more than $70 billion in active mandates. The acquisition of Semler Scientific, completed Jan. 16, 2026, folded an existing Bitcoin (BTC) reserve into the balance sheet. Strive launched its first ETF in August 2022, when the firm was known for opposing ESG integration rather than for treasury accumulation. In its filings, management treats Bitcoin's investment performance as the hurdle rate for capital allocation, with Cole calling a high Amplification Ratio, preferred and debt capital divided by coin-stack value, the driver of its bid to outperform the asset itself.

BTC trades near $80,149, about 1.4% below its level when the disclosures crossed the tape and 0.9% lower over 24 hours, COINOTAG data shows. The market sits between the two heaviest composite levels on the board: support at $79,438, scored 85 out of 100, and resistance at $82,289, scored a full 100, per COINOTAG's support and resistance scoring. Positioning is calm, with the funding rate barely positive at 0.0017% and open interest near $16.1 billion; the daily trend reading remains bearish. Strategy (MicroStrategy) (MSTR), the original corporate Bitcoin (BTC) holder, last traded at $140.80, down 0.64% over 24 hours, and the stock's daily trend is also bearish. Price action has been heavy on both, with Bitcoin (BTC) recently stalling under its 50-day moving average ahead of the FOMC.

Two Balance Sheets, One Static Price

Strategy, for its part, stood still. Its Oct. 26 filing shows no Bitcoin bought or sold between Oct. 19 and Oct. 25, with holdings steady at 848,517 coins, the posture that made it the template for the corporate Bitcoin treasury trend. Instead it spent about $204.9 million of USD Cash to repurchase 2,068,459 STRC preferred shares, executing the policy CEO Phong Le set out on July 30, when he said the company would buy back STRC below $100 to trim future payout obligations. Measured at a static $80,000, an assumption both companies' investor materials use for comparability rather than a market quote, Strive's $2.103 billion of preferred nominal against a $3.44 billion coin stack works out to 61.1%, roughly double Strategy's 29.6% on $20.061 billion of convertible principal and preferred nominal against $67.88 billion of holdings. Annualized payouts tell the same story: about $287 million for Strive, 8.4% of its stack, versus Strategy's $1.509 billion, 2.2% of holdings, with STRC's rate now at 12%. Cole has told investors the firm aims to keep preferred capital above 60% of the stack whenever BTC trades under $100,000, and StoneX analyst Mark Palmer raised his ASST price target to $43 from $32 after the SATS deal. Outperformance bets sit against long-horizon forecasts such as Bitwise's $1.6 million Bitcoin (BTC) target for 2036. Cash cushions differ too: Strive held about $504.4 million in cash and equivalents plus $50.18 million in STRC as of Oct. 23, while Strategy listed about $4.83 billion in USD Reserve and $242.4 million in USD Cash as of Oct. 25. Strive reports no debt as of Oct. 23, while Strategy's earliest convertible put date sits in September 2027. Three years after its anti-ESG launch, Strive has become a debt-free, preferred-funded accumulator whose dividend bill is designed to be refinanced forward, with the ATM shelf as the next lever.