While publicly traded companies continued to accumulate Bitcoin in June, the real story of the month unfolded in a corner of the market that didn’t exist a few years ago: the preferred stocks that treasury companies are now using to fund their coin purchases.
A new report from BitcoinTreasuries.net calls June the first true stress test for this “digital credit” market, and its results provide a mixed but definitive verdict on what’s next for corporate Bitcoin adoption.
First, let’s purchase. Nearly 9,000 will be added to the national treasury. $BTC Before release in June, or about 7,300 $BTC On a net basis, it would be worth about $427 million at a month-end price of $58,398. This was considered slow growth, with two names doing most of the work.
Michael Saylor’s Strategy 3,625 added $BTC Net, Strive added 3,364 deals, with each company spending about $200 million.
Once these two are stripped, the remaining field can be purchased for approximately 2,000 pieces. $BTC. For the entire second quarter, the report estimates 110,000. $BTC Net additions were outpacing the previous two quarters.
Context is important here. Bitcoin remains well below its October 2025 peak of around $126,000, falling below $60,000 during the same month. This background set the stage for the drama in digital credits.
Preferred stocks are the driving force behind Bitcoin
To understand why the drama is important, it helps to know how the model works. Companies like Strategy no longer rely on their own cash to buy Bitcoin. They issue preferred shares to investors that promise fixed or variable dividends, sell them for close to $100 par value, and direct the proceeds to the coin.
Strategy’s flagship product, STRC, and Strive’s version, SATA, became the two biggest players in these devices. For a while, they traded in a narrow range around their par value, and investors treated them as a place to park their money at a healthy yield.
Its mild reproductive risk. As the report explains, long-term trading close to par created leverage within STRC as buyers borrowed to expand the deal. That leverage was triggered when the price of Bitcoin fell.
Since June 18th, STRC and SATA have fallen below $100 par value. Leveraged holders received margin calls and forced selling pushed the price down, with STRC bottoming out around $75. SATA was weakened by a combination of its own pressures and spillover effects from the STRC.
This is a positioning crisis, rather than an underlying dividend crisis that continues to flow, the report says.
His recovery was quick enough to reassure his followers. By July 2nd, STRC was trading around $87 and SATA was trading around $97, and these prices remained until the July 9th publication of the report. Neither Strategy nor Strive missed out on dividends.
Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings
According to the report, Strategy had 847,363 people $BTC The average cost was about $75,651, and as of mid-June it had $1.1 billion in reserves, while Strive held 18 months’ worth of dividend reserves. The pitch: These are cash flow issues, not solvency issues.
The strategy didn’t stand still. Saylor’s company has rolled out stock and digital credit buybacks, raised STRC’s dividend, and established a dollar reserve, a package to stabilize the price while continuing to buy the coin. Saylor explained that he framed it as a balance between his commitment to Bitcoin and the “liquidity, discipline, and active capital management” that his credit strategy demands.
Since then, Strategy has sold $3,588 and currently holds 843,775 Bitcoins.
The market voted with volume. STRC and SATA’s combined deal value exceeded $10 billion in June, their respective monthly records, but this was achieved without any new market share sales coming into the pipeline. In other words, demand for paper did not disappear even when prices collapsed.
BitcoinTreasuries.net surveyed its readers and found that they identified as digital trust advocates and were more optimistic than fearful. A slim majority of 52% did not consider falling prices to be a major problem. Most holders are firmly on the sidelines, with 52% of all respondents purchasing STRC or SATA since June 18th.
At the same time, no one is saying the risk is gone, as three-quarters expect price volatility to return. Looking ahead, 77.8% expect the supply of digital credit to increase by the end of 2027, with about a fifth expecting it to exceed $50 billion.
This article originally appeared in Bitcoin Magazine and was written by Micah Zimmerman.
