Strategy, Michael Saylor’s bitcoin treasury company, has used 64% of the fund it set aside to repurchase STRC, according to Protos. The report said the company has spent $1.28 billion from what was once a $2 billion pool, and a Monday filing showed it had less than $724 million remaining.
Protos said Strategy has spent the past 10 weeks trying to push STRC higher through corporate buying. STRC was supposed to sustain a $100 per-share price, but the report said it has failed to do that for most of its trading history.
STRC has spent much of its trading history below the intended level
In Protos’ account, Saylor and Strategy’s CEO marketed STRC by comparing it to a high-yield bank account or a money market product, while emphasizing the dividend and playing down the risk of a sharp drop in the share price.
The report said STRC traded in the $70s and $80s for more than a month, and that the shares closed below $99 on the majority of trading days over the past year. It also said STRC fell below $72 as recently as June before opening trading today at $99.18.
According to Protos, the stock responded to that buying pressure. The report argued that the move higher was engineered by Saylor and funded by dilution borne by retail shareholders.
The $2 billion repurchase program has only been used for STRC
Strategy’s Digital Credit Securities Repurchase Program technically allows the company to repurchase three other Strategy stocks as well: STRF, STRD, and STRK. Even so, Protos said the fund has only ever been used to buy back STRC.
The report added that Strategy has never stated any intended stable price for those other three securities. On that basis, Protos said the program’s real focus is plainly STRC.
Weekly buybacks reached $151.7 million
Protos said Saylor has chosen to spend cash raised through common-share dilution aggressively. Last week alone, Strategy used $151.7 million to repurchase STRC, a pace the report said was six times faster than when the effort began 10 weeks ago.
The cost of those purchases has also risen. Protos said Strategy paid an average of $98.86 per STRC share last week, up from an average of $86.52 in late July.
With funding sourced largely from dilution of common shareholders, Strategy has repurchased 13.3 million STRC shares, or roughly one in eight outstanding shares, according to the report. Protos said the company has been trying to force the market to respect its $100 target.
STRC was launched in July 2025
Protos said Saylor introduced STRC in July 2025 as a perpetual preferred stock with a variable dividend. The product was pitched as offering yield derived from BTC without BTC-style volatility.
The report said Saylor’s view was that BTC should rise by about 30% a year, making a 9% to 12% dividend manageable. Protos added that BTC has not come close to that figure over the past five years.
While BTC remained weak, Strategy’s board raised STRC’s dividend to 12% and approved a $1 billion buyback fund on June 29. By September 8, the board had doubled that authorization to $2 billion, according to the report.
Protos also referenced a separate article saying Strategy’s unrealized BTC losses had exceeded $13 billion, and linked to another report stating that MSTR had lost 75% of its value since STRC began trading.