Strategy Sells Another 1,690 BTC: Bitcoin Breaks $64K as the 'Never Sell' Era Fades

For twelve years, Strategy built its reputation — and its share price — on a single, uncompromising doctrine: borrow, raise, buy bitcoin, and never, ever sell. Monday’s SEC filing broke that orthodoxy for the second week in a row. Between August 3 and 9, the company founded by Michael Saylor sold 1,690 BTC at an average price of $64,262, generating $108.6 million, according to the filing first reported by CoinDesk. It is the first time in the company’s history that it has posted back-to-back weekly sales — and the market noticed: bitcoin slipped below $64,000 on Monday, erasing roughly 2% of its market value and liquidating over $47 million in long positions.

The timing is hardly neutral. Wednesday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the July CPI report, the single most consequential data point left before the Federal Reserve’s September meeting — where markets still see a live, if no longer certain, chance of a rate hike. Strategy’s decision to trim its hoard into that setup, and the market’s reaction to it, frame the week’s central question: who actually holds the marginal bitcoin now, and at what price are they willing to hold it?

The filing, line by line

The weekly disclosure, which Strategy files every Monday, breaks the last seven days into three moves:

• The sale. 1,690 BTC sold at an average of $64,262 apiece, netting $108.6 million. Every dollar went to repurchase 1,152,020 shares of STRC, the company’s variable-dividend preferred stock created to finance its bitcoin acquisitions.
• The raise. 6.59 million shares of MSTR common stock were placed, bringing in $653.1 million. Of that, $650 million flowed into the company’s dollar reserve, which now stands at $4.65 billion as of August 9.
• The dry powder. Strategy retains $785.2 million under its preferred-share buyback program and $1 billion under its common-stock ATM program.

The balance sheet tells the rest of the story. Strategy still holds 840,447 BTC, acquired for $63.36 billion at an average cost of $75,385 per coin. At Monday’s prices, that position sits at a paper loss of roughly 15%.

Why the world’s biggest bitcoin hoarder is selling

The obvious reading — capitulation from the market’s most famous bull — is almost certainly wrong, but so is dismissing the sales as noise. This is a capital-structure arbitrage, not a liquidation. STRC is a floating-rate preferred; its carry cost has climbed with rates, and the shares have traded soft — MSTR itself has now been rejected at the $105 level for the third time, according to Benzinga. Buying back discounted preferreds with bitcoin sold near $64,000 replaces an expensive liability with equity raised at a degraded — but available — price.

Two nuances matter. First, scale: 1,690 BTC is about 0.2% of the company’s stack. This is treasury management, not a distribution event. But second, and more important, it inverts the company’s stated priority for the first time: defend the balance sheet before accumulating. The “raise money, buy BTC” machine was built for a bull market; in a market that has disappointed all year — bitcoin is down roughly 29% since January — it quietly becomes defensive management. Whether the STRC buyback strategy works is now a live market debate, as BeInCrypto noted over the weekend.

The baton pass: corporate treasuries to ETF managers

The most striking contrast in this week’s tape isn’t Strategy’s $108.6 million sale — it’s the $853.5 million that flowed the other way. US spot bitcoin ETFs recorded $853.5 million in net inflows between August 3 and 7, their fifth consecutive positive session and their best week since April, per Zebpay. Whales had already accumulated the equivalent of $1.2 billion in BTC since July 29.

Read together, the two signals sketch a structural handoff: the corporate treasuries that carried the market in 2024-25 — Strategy above all — are stepping back, while asset managers and ETF vehicles step forward. It’s a rotation in who holds the coin, not a flight from it. Tellingly, bitcoin’s 20-day correlation with technology stocks (the IGV index) has turned negative for the first time since May 2024: bitcoin is no longer trading as a high-beta tech stock, for better and for worse.

Bitcoin’s $64,000 battleground

Monday’s price action was a textbook rejection. Bitcoin opened the week at $64,849, pushed to an intraday high near $65,300, and then faded to about $63,900 by the afternoon, down 1.9% on the day, with ether trading near $1,871 (-2.5%) and solana around $76. The failed test of $65,000 — the level our previous analysis flagged as the line between tactical buying and something more durable — was the session’s defining event.

The options market captures the tension perfectly. Realized volatility has collapsed — CoinDesk described it as a volatility “meltdown” — yet downside protection remains expensive. Traders are paying up for insurance on a market that isn’t moving, which is precisely what a range-bound, event-driven week looks like.

Prediction markets: $64K is now a coin flip

The repricing on Polymarket’s August bitcoin markets was the day’s most dramatic move. The probability of bitcoin closing above $64,000 on August 11 collapsed 27 points to 53.5% — the largest 24-hour swing across all tracked markets — while the same threshold for August 12, 13 and 14 sits near 51%. The odds of $66,000 by midweek have fallen to just 5.5%. At the same time, the downside is priced out entirely: the probability of bitcoin staying above $54,000–$58,000 through midweek is 100%.

In plain English: the market sees neither collapse nor breakout — a market pinned between roughly $60,000 and $64,000, where the $64,000 line has become a genuine coin flip. That is exactly what a standoff between selling treasuries, buying ETFs, and a macro catalyst on Wednesday looks like.

Wednesday’s CPI is the real event

All of this is preamble to 8:30 a.m. ET Wednesday, when July CPI lands. Consensus expects core CPI to rise 0.2% month-over-month, with headline inflation at 3.5% in June, down from 4.2% in May but still far from target. The Fed has held rates at 3.50%–3.75% for five consecutive meetings, and the shockingly weak July jobs report (a net loss of 23,000 payrolls) pulled September hike odds down from 55% to roughly 46% on CME FedWatch — but they remain live.

The geopolitical layer adds friction: the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively blocked since late February, and while Iran-Oman talks on a temporary shipping route are reportedly “very close,” Tehran’s list of conditions pushed oil prices higher Monday and cooled risk appetite. A hot CPI print on top of firm oil would revive the September hike scenario in a hurry; a cool one would hand risk assets — bitcoin included — their best excuse to reclaim $65,000.

The regulatory pause that isn’t

The other story of the week remains procedural. The Senate left for recess until September 14 without voting on the CLARITY Act, but Majority Leader John Thune filed a motion to proceed in the pre-dawn hours of Saturday, teeing up a first procedural vote as early as September 15. The bill still needs 60 votes with only 53 Republicans in the chamber, and the ethics clause — tied to the president’s disclosed crypto earnings — remains unresolved. Prediction markets put the odds of enactment in 2026 at roughly 22%, down from 82% in February.

What to watch this week

Three things will decide the near-term direction:

• Wednesday, 8:30 a.m. ET — July CPI. A 0.2% core print is the line in the sand; anything hotter revives September hike odds.
• The $64,000 level. A daily close back above it would flip Monday’s rejection into a retest; a close below $63,000 opens the $60,000–62,000 band.
• Strategy’s Monday filing next week. A third consecutive week of sales would move this from “capital-structure arbitrage” to “regime change” in the market’s eyes — and ETF flows will show whether the baton pass holds.

This article is provided for informational purposes and does not constitute investment advice. Prediction-market probabilities are indicative data, not financial guidance. Sources: Strategy SEC filing via CoinDesk, Benzinga, Zebpay, BLS, CME FedWatch, Polymarket (gamma-api + clob).