After more than two months of fluctuations, Bitcoin finally shows signs of breaking out.

Leading the charge for Bitcoin is still our old friend Michael Saylor, who has introduced a new weapon: STRC.

If you browse Saylor's recent tweets, you'll find that he has been creating content for STRC almost every day. Tropical vacation pools, women holding cocktails—these kinds of AI-generated low-quality promotional videos send a clear signal: the man who brought MSTR to the NASDAQ is using the same marketing firepower for STRC.

Why is he doing this? Because STRC is currently the only tool Strategy has to convert market funds into BTC buying pressure. Over the past three months, every large-scale BTC increase announced by Strategy has had its funding source pointing to STRC.

What is STRC

STRC stands for Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock, a perpetual preferred stock issued by Strategy that went live on the NASDAQ last November.

Its operating mechanism is roughly as follows:

You spend about $100 to buy one share of STRC. Strategy pays dividends in cash monthly, with an annualized rate of 11.5%, which means about 96 cents per share each month. It never matures, and Strategy does not need to repay the principal.

The stock price is anchored around a $100 par value by monthly adjustments to the dividend rate: if it drops below $100, the dividend rate is increased to attract buying pressure back; if it rises above $100, the dividend rate is lowered to let the price fall back to par. The maximum adjustment for the monthly dividend rate is 25 basis points.

Only when the STRC share price is above $100 can Strategy issue new shares at par to raise funds—this is the precondition for the whole flywheel. After deducting the dividend reserves from the proceeds of the additional issuance, the vast majority is used to purchase BTC.

Saylor has named this product "short-duration high-yield credit," or "Bitcoin-supported money market fund." With US Treasury yields around 3.5%, STRC offers a yield equivalent to three times that of US Treasury bonds.

Flywheel

A common misconception about Saylor is that he is infinitely printing money to buy BTC.

He cannot do that. Saylor cannot print money out of thin air; he must wait for the market to hand him funds. For each additional share of STRC issued, there must be real marginal buyers willing to purchase it at $100.

Buyers of STRC are essentially engaging in a credit "transaction," with the 8% yield provided by STRC compensating for the "credit risk of Strategy."

However, what many STRC buyers do not realize is that the funds they use to purchase STRC will be indirectly amplified threefold into BTC.

Strategy has a publicly stated financial goal: a leverage ratio of 33%.

Within the company's funding sources, perpetual preferred stocks like STRC, STRF, and STRK account for about one-third, with the remaining two-thirds coming from MSTR common stock. Saylor refers to this principle as "intelligent leverage." This means that whenever Strategy acquires $1 through STRC, to maintain the 33% leverage line, they must issue about $2 worth of MSTR to invest in BTC. $1 STRC + $2 MSTR = $3 BTC buying pressure.

On April 14, Strategy raised about $1 billion in a single day through STRC. With a threefold amplification, this corresponds to about $3 billion in BTC buying pressure, matching the entire scale of BTC purchases for the first two weeks before the dividend payout in April.

When BTC falls, collateral shrinks, and STRC's credit risk rises, Strategy must raise the dividend rate to compensate for the new level of risk. But the higher the dividend rate, the greater the cash flow pressure and the higher the probability of default. This is a destabilizing feedback loop. During the time last October when BTC halved from $120,000 to $60,000, the STRC dividend rate was raised from 7% to 11.5% just to barely bring back buying pressure.

Conversely, when BTC stabilizes and rises, collateral thickens, credit quality improves, and STRC becomes more attractive at the same dividend rate, further amplifying demand. BlackRock's Preferred and Income Securities ETF listed Strategy's preferred stock as its second-largest holding in April, with the market value rising from about $200 million in March to $344 million, directly endorsing Strategy's current credit status by fixed-income institutions.

The flywheel of Strategy is now turning positively: more funds buy STRC → Strategy amplifies BTC purchases threefold → BTC price is supported → STRC collateral base becomes firmer, credit spreads compress → STRC becomes more attractive at the same dividend rate → more funds purchase STRC.

Dividend Day Arbitrage

The distribution mechanism for preferred stock differs from that of bonds. Bonds accrue interest daily; you earn one day's interest for each day you hold them; preferred stock, on the other hand, pays a fixed amount at predetermined dates. For STRC, as long as you hold it at the close of trading the day before the ex-dividend date, you receive a full monthly dividend of 96 cents.

This creates a clear arbitrage window: rush in to buy in the days before the ex-dividend date, collect the dividend, and sell the next day. Data from the past few months shows that STRC averages a decline of about 20 cents after the ex-dividend date, much less than the 96 cents of the dividend itself. The net profit from a single ex-dividend arbitrage can reach about 40 to 50 cents.

Arbitrageurs will not miss such opportunities.

As shown in the figure, trading volume begins to climb a week before the ex-dividend date, reaches a peak on the ex-dividend date or the day before, and quickly returns to silence after the ex-dividend date. The volume increase in April was noticeably steeper than in March, indicating that more and more funds are starting to participate in STRC's ex-dividend arbitrage.

However, such arbitrage behavior may not be a good thing.

For the STRC product itself, the two to three weeks after the ex-dividend date will enter a "dead zone"—liquidity shrinks, buy-sell spreads widen, and stock prices stay below the $100 par value for a long time. This repeated loss of anchor can erode STRC's positioning as a "money market product," pushing it toward a form that resembles a monthly volatile bond.

For Saylor, his BTC purchases can easily be outrun by arbitrage funds. The issuance of STRC is concentrated in the two weeks leading up to the ex-dividend date, meaning his BTC buying actions are also concentrated during these two weeks.

Now arbitrage traders flock in at the same time each month to buy STRC; they know Saylor is about to take this money to the spot market to buy BTC, so they can purchase BTC in advance, wait for Saylor to drive up the price, and then sell, pushing Saylor's purchase cost higher.

In the past two weeks, the Coinbase spot premium before and after the STRC ex-dividend date has significantly increased

There are two potential solutions: change the dividend frequency, for example from monthly to weekly, to distribute the arbitrage profits; or launch a more basic derivative product with more frequent distributions to disperse concentrated arbitrage trades.

Indeed, Saylor took swift action, announcing on Saturday that Strategy has submitted a proxy statement to plan to change the STRC dividend payment frequency from monthly to bi-monthly. The annual dividend payment obligation and dividend rate will remain unchanged.

If this proposal is approved, the first bi-monthly dividend will be paid on July 15.

Bitwise advisor Jeff Park pointed out that currently there are no corporate bonds on the market that use a bi-monthly dividend payment mechanism, while retail investors' preference for higher-frequency payments has been confirmed by the success of weekly dividend ETFs and other products.

On a deeper level, Jeff Park sees this as a significant step in the cryptocurrency industry's vision of "streaming payments" penetrating traditional capital markets: the frequency of interest payments essentially reflects the efficiency of converting monetary potential into kinetic energy; the era of digital currency should break through artificial time cycle limitations.

He believes that STRC sets a new benchmark for traditional enterprises and looks forward to the future evolution from bi-monthly to daily and even real-time payments.

A New Narrative for DeFi

The emergence of STRC has brought a refreshing wave to the dull DeFi market.

Over the past year, the yield of stablecoins in DeFi has been on a downward trend. The annualized deposit yield for stablecoins on Aave is about 2%, while Ethena's USDe and Sky's USDS are below 4%, and even mainstream stablecoins' PT on Pendle hardly breaks 6%. This yield level corresponds to the risk exposure of smart contracts in the AI era, and the risk-reward ratio has driven many DeFi veterans away.

DeFi needs a credible, sufficiently large source of yield that can bring TradFi money back on-chain, and STRC just provides this opportunity.

Two projects are attempting to package STRC’s yield onto the chain:

Apyx Protocol uses a dual-token model. apxUSD is the base stablecoin supported by collateral from STRC, SATA-type preferred stocks, and excess US Treasury bonds; apyUSD is the staking version that takes on the underlying dividend and interest income, currently yielding about 12.78% annually. The supply scale has reached $130 million, and corresponding yield and leverage products are already available on Pendle and Morpho.

Saturn Credit's sUSDat is a staking yield stablecoin that captures STRC revenue, and the protocol's TVL surged from zero to $72.6 million in just over a month.

According to Pendle market data, the current annualized yield for PT-sUSDat is 9.2%.

Success and Challenges

The more successful Saylor's meticulously designed financial machine operates, the harder a certain problem becomes to avoid.

Strategy currently holds nearly 3.5% of the total BTC supply and continues to advance at a pace of several billion dollars per month.

What was the original value proposition of BTC? A decentralized monetary asset that does not rely on any single entity and cannot be manipulated unilaterally by anyone.

When a publicly listed company's perpetual preferred stock becomes the main marginal buyer of BTC—a decentralized monetary asset that does not rely on any single entity and cannot be manipulated unilaterally—are we seeing Bitcoin drifting away from its original form?

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。