Strategy's 32 BTC Sale Won't Trigger a Treasury Dump, Analysts Say

Bitcoin treasury company Strategy, and its Chair Michael Saylor, have become synonymous with the phrase "never sell your Bitcoin." So when the firm did just that, announcing Monday that it had offloaded 32 BTC for around $2.5 million, the company's stock plunged alongside the price of Bitcoin. The "never sell" crowd, it turns out, sometimes sells.

Crypto market analysts don't believe this marks the beginning of a wave of similar sales by digital asset treasury companies. Rather, they argue, it's a much-needed wake-up call for investors to inspect each company closely. "The market treated a tiny sale the same way it would have treated a large one. That tells you the sensitivity is to the fact that they sold at all, not to the amount," Luke Nolan, Senior Research Associate at CoinShares, told Decrypt. "So it is a watershed in the sense that the largest and most closely watched holder broke the seal, but not in the sense that it pushes other treasuries to follow."

In fact, Tom Lee's ETH treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies and BTC treasury Strive bought a combined $237 million in digital assets—a figure that dwarfs Strategy's $2.5 million sale. (Disclosure: Tom Lee is an investor in Dastan, Decrypt's parent company).

Publicly traded Ethereum treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies once more added to its ETH position last week, even as its Bitcoin-centric counterpart Strategy sold BTC for the first time since 2022. BitMine purchased another 26,497 ETH, or around $52 million worth, as Ethereum trades at $1,967 on Monday, dipping below $2,000 for the first time since March 29, according to data from CoinGecko. "In our view, ETH prices are not reflecting the strengthening of Ethereum fundamentals, but then a...

Camran Khosravi, Research Analyst at Bitwise, told Decrypt that whether other treasury companies start selling has little to do with Strategy and everything to do with each firm's individual finances. He explained that Strategy carries "meaningful" convertible debt of around $6.7 billion and ongoing preferred dividend obligations. By contrast, Khosravi said, Strive has no short or long-term outstanding debt and funds itself through equity rather than debt. "This is not the end of DATs," Khosravi told Decrypt, "but it's a reminder that investors need to look closely at each treasury company's capital structure instead of just its crypto holdings."

However, Khosravi believes Strategy's BTC sale wasn't for survival but to show the world that the firm can sell if it wants to, following Saylor's comments last month that it would do so "to inoculate the market—just to send the message that we did it." Khosravi pointed out that Strategy's sale was "extremely small relative to its holdings" at just 0.004% of its BTC treasury, and over the same period it raised common stock and used cash to pay down debt. "This does not look like forced selling," Khosravi said, adding that, "The likelier read is that Strategy is showing its Bitcoin holdings are one of several funding tools it can use alongside equity, preferred stock, debt, and cash to fund its dividend obligations."

Sam Ruskin, a former analyst at Messari and current investor at Reciprocal Ventures, added that selling crypto is inevitable for publicly traded treasury firms. "I don't think any public company has the luxury of 'holding forever' when you have a fiduciary obligation to shareholders, especially if you're down billions of dollars in unrealized profit and loss," Ruskin told Decrypt, adding that, "they have to please the shareholders at the top."

Despite the recent sale, Strategy's Bitcoin reserve is in the red by $5.85 billion, according to the SaylorTracker, following Bitcoin's 46% drop from all-time high prices set in October 2025, per CoinGecko data. As such, the sale comes after months of pressure mounting against treasury firms throughout the market. "Many of these firms accumulated exposure during a period when investors were rewarding crypto-related balance sheets with premium valuations," G