I have been in the space long enough to know how people respond when you tell them that BTC pays no yield. And I mean people in the traditional markets, people that believe things should do something by the end of every month, and as they see BTC just minding its own business in cold wallets they call it dead capital. I used to argue with them for ages until I realized that we are not not talking about the same thing. Bitcoin was never there to give you yield. It was there to be the asset that appreciates when everything inflates. It doesn't give you more coins, it gives you more buying power, and once you forget that you start creating yield out of thin air.
Have you heard about what Strive is doing with BTC? Strive is the Dallas-based asset manager co-founded by Vivek Ramaswamy who went public in 2025 and has become a Bitcoin holding business. They hold more than 21,000 BTC and currently among the top seven public treasury holding and they did it fast. The market saw the volume but no one knows where the money is coming from.
They don't generate income out of the business, their quarter recently had an 18% gain and a huge loss, but they floated it with a preferred SATA at a $100 par that pays 13% interest in cash every business day. No US security has traded for yield dividend every day in US history. The whole point is to keep SATA at $100. If it goes above $100 they print more shares for sale and use that money to buy more BTC. If it falls below $100 they raise the interest rate to attract buyers.
The problem is not how many Bitcoin they are buying or bought, but from what path the dividend cash is coming from, since they don't create cash. This is what they said in their own filings, dividends are paid from three sources:
- Profits from the sale of their stock in the SATA company
- A cash buffer that could pay this dividend for 18 months
- A sales of their BTC as a last ditch effort if everything else fails.
They called that a "return of capital" which means that they don't have any kind of business yield, just capital cost.
So, when you look at it technically, the cost is too much. They have sold $1 billion of SATA and at 13%, they have to come up with $130 million in pure cash every year, before common shareholders get anything. If you look at historical prices, they paid an average price of about $93K per BTC, while BTC has been going around between $70 to $80, so on paper, they are out hundreds of millions of dollars, but they still had to pay SATA interest of $26 million last quarter.
This is a system just waiting to explode and make people go broke because in order for the common stock to win in the long run BTC has to rise by a rate of more than 13% a year or they have to keep selling new SATA to new people forever. And what happens when there are no new buyers?