Strategy Q1 2026 Earnings Call — Full Q&A Notes

Full Q&A notes from Strategy’s Q1 2026 earnings call, organized by analyst question.

Capital Stack Strategy

Pete Christiansen, Citi

Question: Given that Strategy was burned by a false signal last year when the market feared it was selling BTC, should investors read today’s call as a deliberate signal that Strategy is now willing to be more tactical and proactive with its capital stack — including potentially selling Bitcoin?

Yes — Saylor confirmed this is exactly the signal. Strategy is actively turning on the “BTC drive” as a third lever alongside the equity ATM and the credit ATM.

• $65B in BTC, $2.2B tax credit sitting on the floor — want to monetize it
• Will likely sell some BTC specifically to fund a dividend — framed as an “inoculation” move to prove the company doesn’t need to sell equity to cover obligations, killing the short thesis
• “If you’re a short seller and your thesis is the company’s got to sell equity in order to fund the dividends, I would like nothing better than to rip your wings off”
• The BTC sale isn’t distress, it’s optionality signaling. At elevated mNAV multiples, demonstrating flexibility means each unit of dilution does more work — the capital structure machine is running, not straining

Macro & Interest Rates

Jeff Park — @dgt10011

Question: As we move toward a dovish environment and STRC has an explicit interest rate sensitivity via its floating rate dynamic, how does Strategy think about the tradeoff between issuing more STRC vs. reducing the coupon when rates fall and STRC trades above par? What input parameters take priority?

• Risk-off / restrictive policy = bad for BTC, very bad for MSTR (“risk assets cubed”), slows everything down
• Risk-on / accommodative = run the vehicle as hard as possible — more equity issuance, more credit issuance
• STRC issuance velocity is a direct function of BTC ARR: 30% BTC growth = grow credit aggressively; 50% = go faster
• The scenario where they’d slow credit: credit demand triples but BTC and equity don’t rally — then they’d consider adjusting the dividend rate down. Saylor thinks this is highly unlikely
• Fong’s addendum: current constraint is awareness and marketing, not rate sensitivity. That’s a 5–10 year maturation problem, not today’s problem
• Saylor’s Amazon framing: would rather sell $500B of STRC at 11% than $50B at 9%. Scale over margin. The war for the future of credit markets is won with money, not basis points

Bitcoin as Layer 3

Andrew Harte, BDIG

Question: You’ve described Bitcoin as digital capital, MSTR as digital equity, and STRC as digital credit — and hinted at digital money as a layer 3 built on top. Who’s building that layer, and are you having those conversations?

• Apex, Saturn, and Hermetica already issuing yield coins powered by STRC
• DeFi protocols offering 2–10x leverage loops on STRC (Pendle-style)
• Saylor sees a Cambrian explosion: yield coins in every currency, every regulatory container — ETF, neo-bank, private fund, token
• DeFi players moving fastest right now because stable coin issuers need yield to compete with Tether and Circle — an 8% yield coin is compelling; 25% locked staking is the aggressive end
• Three dozen initiatives now underway that didn’t exist 8–12 weeks ago
• ETF players coming but slower due to regulatory friction
• Neo-bank digital yield accounts (“8% on your money”) seen as a future path — different counterparty, different platform, different regulatory container for each
• Saylor’s framing: the killer app of Bitcoin is digital credit. You know it’s a good app when someone wants to buy a billion dollars of it a day

Bitcoin Ownership Shift

Eric Balchunas, Bloomberg — @EricBalchunas

Question: River data shows businesses, ETFs, and governments have collectively bought ~1M BTC over 16 months while individuals sold 730K — a “silent IPO.” Does this mainstreamification of Bitcoin risk alienating the original cypherpunk base, and does it matter for price?

• Saylor’s reframe: $1.4T of wealth created for OGs via the institutional bid. Corporate capital drove price from $10K to $100K; 90% of the gain went to existing holders
• 85–90% of network still in non-institutional hands; corps and ETFs combined represent less than 10–15% of supply despite spending $150–200B to get there
• OG sellers are likely geopolitical liquidation — Iran, China, Ukraine — not ideological exit. A trillion dollars of crypto OG capital gains sitting quietly off-grid
• Counter-analogy to “Facebook when your parents joined”: more like the internet when Amazon started doing business on it. The protocol didn’t change; the use cases scaled
• Corporations do the lobbying, fix accounting/tax/banking, put BTC on every iPhone and Android. OGs can’t and won’t do that
• Network is more decentralized now, not less — BlackRock’s ETF alone has 50–100 million beneficiaries; Strategy has another 100 million. Institutional holders distribute exposure orders of magnitude wider than concentrated OG wallets

Volatility & Quantum

Ramsey El-Assal, Cantor

Question: You mentioned that if Bitcoin volatility falls as price accelerates, you have cards to play to preserve the model’s attractiveness — can you elaborate? And separately, any update on the BTC security / quantum initiative?

• High vol = equity positive — MSTR was the single largest options trade in the entire US market on the day of this call
• Low vol = credit positive — as vol falls, BTC credit risk falls, amplification ratios can expand, and the instruments become investment grade at lower BTC ratings
• The forward vol curve is the single most important variable for credit investors right now
• At BTC vol of 40 with a BTC rating of 3 → starts to look investment grade. At vol of 30 → investment grade at a rating of 1.5. Below 30 → amplification can triple or quadruple
• If BTC vol falls to 30 → everything they sell is investment grade → potential 10x bid, lever up 8:1 instead of 3:1
• Long-run expectation: 40 vol / 40 ARR matures to 20 vol / 20 ARR as asset grows, liquidity deepens, and inertia sets in. Will always be more volatile than the S&P — and more useful

On quantum: Fong assembling a Bitcoin Security Program/Council across custodians, exchanges, and large treasury companies. Goal is a shared point of view on quantum risk timeline, what’s being developed, and how to get to consensus. Announcement expected within ~1 month. Currently a lot of divergent views — this group is the organizing catalyst.

Credit Risk Sentiment

Jeff Walton, Strive — @PunterJeff

Question: Strategy has created a unique arbitrage surface across its instruments, with STRC and others trading just below par. Does the market actually agree with your risk framing, and what’s the biggest hurdle to accelerating digital credit adoption?

• Blunt answer: the market doesn’t agree. If it did, STRF would be at $200
• All instruments — equity, preferred, converts — are undervalued in Saylor’s view. The market is embryonic and biased pessimistically
• Lendy effect: it takes time. Amazon took 10 years after doing what they were doing before the market got it. Same for Netflix, Apple, Google, Nvidia. Digital credit will follow the same arc
• Path to rerate: track record + time + education + partners creating compelling downstream products
• STRC gets a deliberate carve-out — variable rate means you’re not locking in a mispriced trade, so Saylor has far more enthusiasm to sell STRC at 11.5% than STRF at 10%
• STRC being the most successful preferred stock in a century is the proof-of-concept signal that some people already get it
• The rerating will happen “when we least expect it” — like Buffett buying Apple, multiples going from 10x to 25–30x overnight

Regulatory / Policy

Randy Binner, Texas Capital

Question: With so many arrows pointing in the right direction for crypto regulation, what would be the single most important regulatory or policy change for Strategy? And do the midterms or next presidential election still matter much from a policy standpoint?

• Strong position: Strategy doesn’t need any regulatory change to 10x or 100x. BTC, MSTR equity, and STRC are all sitting in regulatory safe harbors — settled securities law going back 100 years, NASDAQ-listed, no ambiguity
• Clarity Act is second-order for MSTR — primarily matters for token issuers, DeFi, stable coins, and exchanges; determines the balance of power between crypto natives and the banking system
• For Strategy: Clarity passage changes sentiment, not structure
• Primary wish: Basel rules updated to recognize BTC as legitimate collateral pari passu with gold — would unlock insurance company and regulated bank adoption without those institutions needing a regulatory gatekeeper to tell them it’s okay
• Fong addition: tokenization of securities via Clarity or SEC rulemaking would accelerate layer 2 STRC development. Already $270M of tokenized STRC sold outside the US via Apex and StockX/Kraken — regulatory clarity unlocks the US market and accelerates digital credit overall

Optimal Balance Sheet

James Lavish, Bitcoin Opportunity Fund — @jameslavish

Question: With Strategy’s energy so focused on STRC, what does the optimal future balance sheet look like for maximizing common shareholder value? Does that include retiring the other debt and preferred instruments, and is that necessary to attract the largest institutions to STRC?

• Goal: completely debt-free. All six convertible bonds go away — swap for STRC, swap for equity, or repay with cash
• STRC is the jewel in the crown — the one instrument they’ll actively promote, polish, and grow
• Other four credit instruments (STRF, STRK, STRD, STRE) — watch and nurture; jury still out on whether they drive meaningful demand. Won’t retire them because that destroys billions in optionality, but not prioritizing new issuance
• Clean sheet design for a Bitcoin treasury company: one common equity + one monthly or semi-monthly variable preferred (STRC) + BTC stack. Nothing else. Saylor gives this advice freely to anyone who asks
• Three things that actually matter: mNAV and common premium, BTC stack, STRC as the digital credit instrument. Everything else is secondary

Logistics: Retail investor Q&A scheduled May 13. Shareholder vote coming early June to move STRC dividends from monthly to semi-monthly — framed as making the instrument more attractive. Shareholders asked to vote early.