Standard Chartered sees communication challenges facing the biggest digital asset treasury company as “muddying the waters” for Bitcoin in the near term.
Strategy co-founder and chairman Michael Saylor again took to social media on Sunday to offer his latest signal to investors, even as one analyst said Saylor’s messaging needed more clarity to help Bitcoin regain its momentum.
“Orange dots tell only part of the story,” was Saylor’s message in a post that accompanied a chart from Saylortracker.com, similar to previous social media messages that have preceded news of Strategy’s Bitcoin (BTC) purchases, typically announced the day after his posts.
In recent weeks, the largest digital asset treasury company and major BTC holder has moved away from its long-time “never sell Bitcoin” approach to a willingness to sell the biggest crypto as needed to fund dividends for holders of its STRC preferred stock and to replenish its cash reserves. Earlier this month, Strategy sold $216 million worth of Bitcoin, reducing its total holdings to 843,775 tokens, according to a July 6 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Days earlier, Strategy unveiled a capital framework allowing Bitcoin sales to fund dividends, increased the annual dividend rate on its STRC preferred stock to 12%, and disclosed that its US dollar reserve had grown to $2.55 billion.
Standard Charter’s global head of digital assets research, Geoff Kendrick, said Strategy’s recent actions — and Saylor’s manner of communicating them — “are muddying the waters for BTC near-term.”
“We think effective communication of MSTR’s new strategy (using BTC to back STRC) is key to reassuring markets that wholesale selling is unlikely; this should in turn support BTC prices,” Kendrick wrote in a note to clients on Friday. “Indeed, if this signalling proves effective, it should remove the need for MSTR to actually sell any BTC by supporting STRC’s price,” he said.
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StanChart sees inconsistencies in “never sell” approach
Kendrick said that Strategy’s long-held “never sell” approach limited what the company could with its industry-biggest digital asset treasury.
“The problem with the ‘never sell’ approach is that it limits what MSTR’s BTC holdings can do — or, perhaps more importantly, what they are perceived to be doing,” the StanChart analyst said. “MSTR has started to shift its communication strategy on this in recent months. It has sold BTC twice and recently announced a BTC monetization program.”
Still, he sees Strategy’s “market signaling” as potentially improving soon and bringing more clarity to the outlook for Bitcoin, on which StanChart maintains its $100,000 year-end forecast.
Shares struggle from year low ahead of earnings report
Investors who bought into the Strategy narrative have not had an easy time in the past 12 months. The STRC preferred shares were formulated to hold a price of $100 apiece. Shareholders saw that par value fall to the wayside last month, to the lowest value since the preferred stock was introduced a year ago.
The common shares, trading under the MSTR ticker, have lost more than 70% of their value since July 2025, closing at $94.64 per share on Friday, down from a 52-week high of $457.22.
The company is slated to report second-quarter earnings on July 30, with analysts consensus of $4.28 per share, according to Yahoo Finance data. Earnings have fallen short of analyst forecasts in six of the last eight quarters, according to Fintel.io data, including a 33.76% negative surprise in the first quarter of 2026.
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