Strategy now holds 815,061 BTC — surpassing BlackRock's IBIT at 802,824 BTC for the first time since Q2 2024. The overtake was fueled by a $2.54 billion purchase last week (34,164 BTC), Strategy's third-largest ever, funded through perpetual preferred stock and equity issuance during a period when BTC was 40% below its all-time high.
Strategy now holds 815,061 BTC — surpassing BlackRock's IBIT at 802,824 BTC for the first time since Q2 2024. The overtake was fueled by a $2.54 billion purchase last week (34,164 BTC), Strategy's third-largest ever, funded through perpetual preferred stock and equity issuance during a period when BTC was 40% below its all-time high.
Strategy (MSTR) has overtaken BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) as the single largest holder of bitcoin, with 815,061 BTC compared to IBIT's 802,824 BTC — a lead of more than 12,000 coins.
The milestone was reached after Strategy announced its third-largest bitcoin purchase on record: 34,164 BTC acquired last week for roughly $2.54 billion at an average price of $74,395 per coin. The purchase was funded through $2.2 billion raised via perpetual preferred stock (STRC) sales and $366 million from common stock offerings.
This marks the first time Strategy has held more bitcoin than IBIT since Q2 2024, when BlackRock's spot ETF rapidly accumulated assets following its January 2024 launch.
The contrast between how these two vehicles accumulated 800,000+ BTC is stark:
Strategy (Corporate Treasury):
BlackRock IBIT (Spot ETF):
The overtake is symbolically significant even if the 12,000 BTC gap is narrow. IBIT was the poster child of the institutional crypto adoption narrative — it grew faster than any ETF in history and proved Wall Street demand for bitcoin exposure was real.
But Strategy's willingness to buy aggressively through a 50% drawdown — using innovative capital tools like STRC — demonstrates a fundamentally different thesis. Strategy isn't providing passive exposure. It's making a leveraged bet on bitcoin's long-term value, and it's willing to dilute equity holders to fund it.
The more important signal for the market: Strategy added nearly 80,000 BTC in 2026 while BTC was between $65K-$78K. That's roughly 0.4% of bitcoin's total supply purchased by a single publicly traded company in less than four months — during a bear market. If BTC recovers to its ATH, Strategy's cost basis of $75,527 means the entire 815K BTC stash goes deep into the green.
Meanwhile, IBIT's holdings remained relatively stable during the same period, reflecting that ETF investors trimmed exposure during the drawdown rather than adding. The two largest bitcoin vehicles in the world now represent opposing strategies: passive institutional allocation (IBIT) vs. aggressive leveraged accumulation (Strategy).
Capital Group ($3.3T AUM) disclosed a 10.63% stake (136M shares, ~$203M) in Metaplanet, making it the largest shareholder of Japan's premier Bitcoin treasury company. The firm already holds a position in Strategy, now extending its Bitcoin treasury thesis across two jurisdictions.
T. Rowe Price, the $1.89 trillion asset manager, launched the T. Rowe Price Active Crypto ETF (TKNZ) on NYSE Arca — the first actively managed multi-token spot crypto exchange-traded product in the marketplace. The fund holds a diversified portfolio across Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB, XRP, Solana, and Hyperliquid, with active allocation adjustments led by Blue Macellari, Head of Digital Assets since 2022.
The SEC approved an immediately effective rule change quadrupling IBIT options position limits from 250,000 to 1,000,000 contracts, enabling up to $5B in notional options exposure per participant. The approval landed the same day BlackRock reported record $15.3T AUM and $191.7B Q2 inflows, even as IBIT shed $3.3B during the quarter.