The Pref Stack

Issue #001 · Week of May 25th, 2026

The weekly read on bitcoin treasury preferreds. Published by BitcoinQuant.

Hi friends,

Welcome to our first issue of The Pref Stack!

Bitcoin treasury preferreds are the most important capital markets story nobody is covering systematically. Strategy now has four preferred series outstanding. Strive's SATA is paying 13%. And the people buying these instruments, increasingly institutional, increasingly yield-focused, deserve better than fragmented X threads and issuer IR pages.

Every week, you'll get the full stack: prices, yields, coverage, pipeline, and one piece of analysis.

This week the story is divergence. STRC is trading at $99.30, essentially at par, doing exactly what it was designed to do. STRK is at $73.02, down nearly 27% from its $100 stated value. STRD is at $73.36. STRF held above par at $101.49. SATA closed at $100.01. Same issuer category, wildly different price behavior. The market is finally pricing these instruments as the distinct credit and equity-hybrid securities they actually are, not as interchangeable yield vehicles.

Let's get into it.

The Stack

The four Strategy preferreds plus SATA now represent the entirety of the bitcoin treasury preferred universe at scale. The 378 basis point spread between STRF on the low end and STRD on the high end is an expression of how the market is pricing seniority, structure, and risk within a single issuer family. That spread didn't exist six months ago.

Issuer Watch

Strategy (Nasdaq: MSTR, STRC, STRF, STRK, STRD).

Big week. Strategy disclosed on May 18th the purchase of 24,869 BTC for approximately $2.01 billion between May 11th and May 17th, at an average price of $80,985 per coin. The acquisition was funded nearly entirely through STRC issuance, the company raised approximately $2.0 billion in notional STRC over that window, plus $84 million in MSTR common via the ATM. Total holdings now stand at 843,738 BTC at an aggregate cost of roughly $63.87 billion, or $75,700 per coin average cost basis.

Strategy also completed a $1.5 billion convertible note repurchase between May 11th–25th, reducing total convertible obligations from $8.2 billion to $6.7 billion.

YTD BTC Yield: 13.3%

YTD BTC Gain: 89,378 BTC (or roughly $6.8 billion in dollar terms)

The pattern is unmistakable. Strategy is steadily replacing convertible debt with preferred equity, specifically STRC. The capital structure is migrating away from instruments that can dilute common shareholders and toward instruments that don't. This is the shift Saylor has been telegraphing for months, and the May activity is the clearest evidence yet that it's accelerating.

Strive (Nasdaq: ASST, SATA).

Two material updates this week.

First, the headline: Strive will become "The Daily Dividend Company" effective June 16th, 2026. SATA will be the first listed security in U.S. capital markets history to pay cash dividends every business day. The annual rate stays at 13.00%, but the compounding effect of daily payments lifts the effective APY to 13.88%, a 7.57 basis point pickup before considering the time-value benefit to holders of getting cash faster. CEO Matt Cole called it a "zero-to-one innovation," and he was completely right to do so.

Second, the buying continues. Strive disclosed Tuesday that it purchased an additional 1,109 BTC between May 19th–22th at an average price of $76,988 per coin, for approximately $85.4 million. Total holdings now stand at 16,500 BTC, making Strive the seventh-largest public corporate bitcoin holder, having just leapfrogged Coinbase (16,492 BTC) and Riot (15,680 BTC).

YTD BTC Yield: 23.4%

Amplification ratio: 45.2%.

Strive also indicated it is evaluating a near-term refresh of its ATM programs for both Class A common and SATA, which would extend issuance capacity. The company carries zero debt, an 18+ month USD dividend reserve, and currently runs the highest preferred-equity amplification ratio among bitcoin treasury companies.

The Spread

Strive just turned SATA into something the U.S. capital markets have never seen before.

The daily dividend announcement deserves more than a bullet in Issuer Watch. It's the most interesting structural innovation in this asset class since Strategy launched STRC last summer, and it changes how SATA should be analyzed.

Here's the mechanical change.

Today, SATA pays $1.0833 per share monthly. After June 16th, that same annualized 13.00% rate gets divided across roughly 250 business days and paid each one. Same dollar dividend over a year.

The APY math is the most-quoted benefit. At the same stated 13.00% rate, monthly compounding produces 13.80% APY; daily compounding produces 13.88%. That's 7.57 bps of pickup, which Strive itself describes as "modest on its own."

But the more interesting effects are the ones the APY calculation doesn't capture.

Holders get cash faster. Every business day, holders of record on the prior business day get paid. Reinvestment optionality increases. Float between dividend declaration and cash receipt collapses from up to 30 days to one day.

Ex-dividend trading dynamics change fundamentally. Traditional monthly preferred dividends create a sawtooth price pattern, price builds toward the ex-date, then drops by roughly the dividend amount when it goes ex. Daily dividends should smooth that pattern almost entirely. The price behavior of SATA after June 16th will be one of the most interesting experiments in preferred stock structure we've seen in years.

The product moves closer to a yield-bearing checking account than a traditional preferred. This matters for the buyer profile. A traditional preferred trades primarily to institutional income desks and yield-focused retail. A daily-paying preferred is far more attractive to anyone treating the position as a cash-like sleeve, which is a much larger pool of potential capital.

The strategic logic is also interesting. Strive is the second mover in BTC-backed preferreds, so they cannot win by replicating Strategy's playbook. They have to differentiate. Pairing the highest yield in the universe (13.00% vs. STRC's 11.50%) with a payment cadence nobody else offers is the kind of asymmetric positioning that makes sense for a smaller, faster-moving issuer trying to claim uniqueness if you will. "The Daily Dividend Company" is a product strategy, not just a cute tagline from their marketing team.

Whether daily dividends become a category norm or remain a Strive-specific feature is now an open question. If Strategy ever follows, it would be confirmation that the structural innovation worked. If they don't, the moat holds for Strive.

For allocators evaluating SATA right now, the daily dividend shifts the analysis in one direction: same yield, better cash flow profile, modest APY pickup, and a structural feature competitors cannot quickly replicate. The 13.00% rate isn't changing, but the way you receive it is.

The Pipeline

Key dates ahead:

• SATA: Final monthly dividend cadence runs through mid-June. Daily dividends begin June 16th, 2026.
• STRC: Next monthly rate reset expected mid-June. Current rate: 11.50%.
• STRF: Next quarterly payment expected mid-June.

Watch list:

• STRC monthly rate reset. The current 11.50% rate has held since the April adjustment. A rate increase signals the market is demanding more yield to keep STRC at par. A rate decrease signals STRC demand is strong enough that Strategy can pay less.
• Strategy's ATM pace. Roughly $2 billion of STRC drawn in two weeks. The pace of STRC issuance is the cleanest live indicator of Strategy's capital markets access and BTC accumulation runway.
• Strive's ATM refresh. The company indicated it is evaluating refreshed programs for both Class A common and SATA. New shelf capacity would extend the runway for SATA growth meaningfully.
• SATA price behavior post-June 16th. Watch for whether daily dividends smooth out the historical sawtooth pattern around ex-dates.

No new BTC preferred S-1s on file from third-party issuers as of this writing. We're tracking the space and will publish names as soon as anything hits EDGAR.

Closing

The Pref Stack exists because we believe bitcoin treasury preferreds are going to be a generational capital markets category, and that the people allocating to them deserve proper coverage. We're going to give them that, every week, for as long as this category is interesting. Which we suspect will be a while.

If this is useful, forward it. If something looks wrong, tell us. If you want us to cover a specific issuer, instrument, or question, the inbox is open.

See you next week.

- Halston Valencia

Head of Operations, BitcoinQuant