Mentioned in This Article
1. Strive Adds 6,182 Bitcoin in a Single Week
Strive, Inc. (Nasdaq: ASST) disclosed in an SEC filing on Monday, October 26, that it bought 6,182 bitcoin (BTC) for $511.4 million between October 17 and October 23, at an average price of $82,732 per coin. The purchase lifts the company's total to 43,000 BTC. The filing also revealed a new at-the-market program that lets Strive sell up to $1 billion of its SATS preferred stock to fund further purchases.
The Strive bitcoin purchase follows a run of rapid accumulation. The company reported 36,818 BTC on October 20, after buying 4,045 BTC between October 12 and October 16, and the latest figure adds 6,182 BTC to that total.
Public companies that hold bitcoin on their balance sheets are usually called treasury companies. Their appeal to investors is that the shares offer indirect exposure to the asset, and many of them raise money by selling stock and then converting the proceeds into coins. Strive follows that approach, with the added feature that it relies on preferred stock, which sits between debt and common equity in a company's capital structure and typically pays a fixed or variable dividend.
Alongside the coins, Strive's cash and marketable securities rose by $187.7 million over the same period, reaching $554.6 million. In other words, the company took in more capital than it spent on bitcoin during the week.
2. How Strive Paid for the Purchase
The buying followed the close of Strive's upsized initial public offering of SATS, a 15% Series A Perpetual Preferred Stock, roughly a week earlier. Strive sold 7 million shares at $90 each, raising about $630 million in gross proceeds before underwriting costs and expenses.
The offering originally targeted $500 million and was enlarged by 2 million shares because of demand. Shares trade on Nasdaq under the ticker SATS. Each share carries a stated amount of $100, and dividends accrue at 15% of that amount. Because the shares sold for $90, the effective yield at the issue price is about 16.67%.
Dividends are payable only if the board declares them, with the first payments scheduled to begin on November 9. Like those on Strive's earlier preferred stock, they are paid every business day rather than monthly or quarterly, a structure designed to appeal to income-seeking investors.
Strive also set aside a $157.5 million dividend reserve at closing, enough to cover 18 months of payments. That amount equals $22.50 per share across the 7 million shares sold.
3. What Is the $1 Billion SATS At-the-Market Program?
An at-the-market program, or ATM, allows a listed company to sell newly issued shares gradually into the open market at prevailing prices, through sales agents, instead of in a single underwritten deal. The company decides when and how much to sell, usually in response to demand and price.
Strive's filing authorizes sales of up to $1 billion of SATS in this way. The sales agents named are Cantor Fitzgerald, Barclays, Clear Street, StoneX, B. Riley Securities, Maxim Group and H.C. Wainwright.
The company can issue SATS when market conditions support the price and put the proceeds into bitcoin. It has also said proceeds may go toward income-generating assets, working capital, share buybacks or acquisitions, which leaves management room to choose between buying coins and other uses depending on conditions.
4. The Playbook Strive Borrowed From Its First Preferred Stock
The SATS program copies the template Strive used for SATA, its first preferred stock, which pays a variable dividend in cash each business day. Strive opened a $500 million ATM for SATA in December 2025, and in May that program absorbed, in a single day, more than the entire daily supply of newly mined bitcoin.
That comparison is a useful yardstick. Miners produce a limited number of coins every day, so a buyer that takes in more than a day's worth of issuance can influence supply and demand at the margin, even if the effect fades quickly in a market as deep as bitcoin's.
Why does the timing matter? Because the SATS offering closed about a week before the purchase window began, the purchase shows the proceeds being turned into bitcoin almost immediately rather than sitting idle. The jump in cash and marketable securities to $554.6 million shows that not all the capital was spent at once, leaving the company a cushion alongside its dividend reserve.
Strive's approach is to fund purchases with common and preferred equity rather than borrowing. The company says it has no debt at all, meaning no bonds, no credit lines and no leveraged positions. That makes its risk profile different from treasury firms that rely on convertible notes or loans, though it takes on a fixed dividend obligation instead.
5. Who Is Strive and How Fast Has It Grown?
Strive became a publicly traded bitcoin treasury company in 2025 through a reverse merger, a route that lets a private business take over an already listed shell. In January it completed an all-stock acquisition of Semler Scientific, described as the first time one public bitcoin treasury company bought another.
The growth since then has been steep. Strive held about 7,525 BTC in December 2025, and its holdings have now expanded more than fivefold to 43,000 BTC. At the average price paid last week, the most recent purchase alone was worth more than half a billion dollars.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Matt Cole described the SATS offering as a critical milestone in the company's strategy to maximize long-term total returns for its common equity investors. The common shares, in other words, are meant to benefit from the bitcoin that preferred holders' capital helps buy.
6. The Dividend Burden Behind the Strategy
The trade-off in this model is straightforward. Preferred investors receive a high, regular payout, and in return the company gets permanent capital to deploy into bitcoin. If bitcoin rises faster than the cost of that capital, common shareholders gain; if it stalls, the dividend bill continues regardless.
A 15% stated rate on $100 per share is demanding. The 18-month reserve of $157.5 million gives Strive a buffer, but the ATM program means the pool of shares owed dividends could grow, and with it the cash required every business day. The dividends are declared by the board, so payments are not guaranteed, yet skipping them would likely damage the stock's appeal and the company's ability to keep raising money this way.
Investors in preferred stock face a different set of risks than holders of common shares. Their claim on the company ranks ahead of common stockholders, but SATS ranks structurally behind SATA and behind any present or future debt, so the order of repayment in a downturn matters. Prices for such shares can also fall below their stated amount when markets doubt a company's ability to keep paying, which is why the dividend reserve is highlighted so prominently.
The price paid also matters. Strive's average cost of $82,732 per coin last week sat above where bitcoin has traded recently, which means the latest tranche was, at least on paper, slightly underwater when the filing was made.
7. How Does Strive Compare With Strategy?
Strategy, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin with 848,517 BTC, proposed daily dividends on its five preferred stocks in September. Strive's structure, with daily payments on both SATA and SATS, sits in the same family of products, and the two companies now compete for the same pool of yield-hungry investors.
The competition is not only for investors. Each treasury company is also competing to be seen as the most efficient vehicle for owning bitcoin, and measures such as the number of coins held per share, the cost of capital and the reliability of dividends are all used to compare them. A larger ATM gives Strive more flexibility on the first of those measures, while the 15% rate makes the cost of capital the central question.
At 43,000 BTC, Strive remains a small fraction of Strategy's stack, but its pace of accumulation relative to its size is considerably faster. Investors who follow bitcoin treasury companies tend to watch weekly filings closely, because each one reveals how much capital the issuer was able to raise and how willing it was to deploy it at current prices.
8. What to Watch Next
Readers following the story should keep two things apart: the amount Strive raised and the amount it can still raise. The $630 million from the initial offering has largely been put to work or reserved, while the $1 billion ATM represents capacity rather than cash in hand. How much of that capacity is actually used depends entirely on market demand for SATS, and the company is under no obligation to sell any of it.
The first date to note is November 9, when SATS dividends are scheduled to begin, subject to board declaration. The second is the pace at which Strive draws on the new ATM. Sales under the program will appear in future filings, and the company's weekly disclosures will show how much of the proceeds are directed to bitcoin rather than to the other uses the company has listed.
For the broader market, the main question is whether demand for high-yield bitcoin-linked preferred stock persists if the price of bitcoin remains near $80,000. The reception of SATS, which was upsized once, suggests appetite exists, but the ATM will test it over time because shares sold into the market need continuous buyers.