The difference between what Strive paid last week and what the dashboard printed is $2,331 a coin, which across 1,800 coins is roughly $4.2m of paper loss on five days of buying, or 2.9% of cost [1]. Set against a stack of 23,156 coins worth about $1.79bn at that same screen price [5], that is small. It is also the entire question, since the financing carries a coupon that the bitcoin itself does not pay.
Start with the coupon. SATA pays 13.00% a year, disbursed every business day since June 16 [3], which chief executive Matthew Cole has called a true zero-to-one innovation [15], and BitcoinTreasuries.NET's July digital credit report puts recent sector preferred issuance at 3x to 4.5x leverage, meaning $3 to $4.50 of bitcoin standing behind each dollar of preferred [11]. Thirteen cents of annual cash against $4.50 of coin is 2.9% a year; against $3.00 it is 4.3% [3]. The stack therefore has to compound somewhere in that band simply to pay the holders of the paper that bought it, before a cent reaches ASST.
Then the pace. Those 1,800 coins arrived over five business days, an average of 360 a day, and Tuesday's 104 is 29% of that [2], call it $8m of bid at the printed spot [6]. This is probably wrong, but I read the slowdown as a funding read rather than a price view, since BitcoinTreasuries.NET says issuance has continued with no buyback activity beside it, which makes the daily purchase a fairly direct meter on how much SATA is clearing [10]. Or rather, the more useful framing is that the dividend goes out on schedule regardless of whether Tuesday's 104 coins were discretionary.
TD Cowen, which lifted its ASST target from $28 to $32 on August 31, a 14% raise [9] [7], has Strive near 4,300 coins for the third quarter. The three weekly paces disclosed so far sum to 2,930, leaving about 1,370, or thirteen more days at Tuesday's rate [4].
What would prove the thesis wrong is straightforward. If SATA keeps clearing at 13% through a quarter in which spot sits below the average cost, then buyers are pricing it as a yield instrument whose collateral happens to be volatile, which is roughly how NYDIG's Greg Cipolaro described these vehicles: "actively managed, capital markets-dependent liability structures backed by a reserve asset, bitcoin" [14]. If instead equity premiums compress the way Galaxy Research warned they could [13], the raise slows and the daily payment carries on regardless. And there is the possibility that the demand backdrop was never as empty as it looks, since Glassnode had treasury vehicles adding between 2,300 and 7,600 coins in July [12], which shows other buyers still active alongside Strive [4].
My view: the required carry of 2.9% to 4.3% [3] is a bar bitcoin has cleared often enough that the coupon is not the binding constraint. The marginal SATA buyer is.
