Strategy and Bitmine Choose Share Buybacks Over Crypto Purchases

Strategy skipped a week of bitcoin buying for the first time since mid-September, while Bitmine added more ether but put a larger sum into repurchasing its own shares. The two biggest companies that hold crypto on their balance sheets chose to defend their paper at the same moment. For the market that is a visible shift, because for months they were the most predictable buyers.

What Strategy did instead of buying bitcoin

According to Strategy's SEC filing, the company neither bought nor sold a single bitcoin between October 19 and 25. It also sold no shares through its ATM program (issuing new stock into the market at the current price). Instead, $204.9 million went into repurchasing 2.07 million STRC preferred shares. That is the biggest weekly buyback in over a month, since the week before it was $193.1 million and the one before that $192.4 million.

The bitcoin stack stayed at 848,517 BTC, bought for $64.02 billion at an average of $75,446 per coin. Bitcoin traded near $80,000 on Monday, so the position is up roughly 6%.

The USD Cash balance fell from $447.3 million to $242.4 million, almost by half. A separate reserve for dividends and debt interest, $4.83 billion, was left alone.

Why the money goes into STRC rather than bitcoin

Since the start of October, Strategy has spent about $664 million repurchasing STRC and only $72.3 million buying 851 BTC. That is nearly nine to one. In September the picture was the opposite, and weekly purchases became the company's trademark.

STRC is a preferred stock with a fixed dividend that Strategy sold to investors to fund its bitcoin purchases. Now it is buying those shares back, which reduces the number of securities that need dividend payments. STRC held at $99.35 on Monday, almost unchanged, so for now the buyback works as a prop.

The company raised the cap on its preferred buyback program from $2 billion to $3 billion, and $956.8 million remains after this week. A separate $1 billion is set aside for repurchasing MSTR common stock.

Bitmine: nearly 5% of ether and a record buyback

Tom Lee's Bitmine also added ether, but in different proportions. Over the week it bought 10,452 ETH worth about $24 million. The repurchase of its own stock was bigger, namely 2.04 million shares at an average of $22.48, or roughly $46 million.

Since the start of 2026, Bitmine has bought back 22.9 million shares for $399.6 million. The company calls it the largest repurchase program among firms that hold crypto on their balance sheets.

After the latest purchase it holds 6,051,933 ETH, or 4.95% of the total ether supply (122.2 million tokens). About 58,000 ETH remain to reach the 5% goal, and Lee has said he will stop buying once the threshold is met. At the current pace that is a matter of weeks. Another 5.2 million ETH, around 86% of the stash, is staked through its own MAVAN platform, which brings the company roughly $318 million in annual revenue.

Lee treats the dip as an opportunity. Ether is down 13% from its recent peak while US chipmakers lost 20%, and from that he concludes that the bull market is still on.

The MSCI index risk for shareholders

On October 15, MSCI finalized a rule under which non-operating companies, whose balance sheets are dominated by a single asset, cannot stay in its Global Investable Market indexes. It takes effect from the close of November 30, and the list of affected companies will be published on November 11. Strategy could land on it, and its chairman Michael Saylor has called the rule discriminatory.

If a company is removed, funds that track those indexes have to sell its shares. That is why buying back its own paper now carries several consequences for investors.

• It props up the price of MSTR and STRC ahead of possible forced selling by index funds.
• The USD Cash pile covers about one more week of buybacks at this size unless new funds are raised.
• Every spare dollar now competes between buying bitcoin and repurchasing shares.

On Monday, ahead of the open, MSTR shares were down 2.2% at $142.80.

What this changes for the bitcoin price

Bitcoin reached $84,777 on Wednesday and traded near $80,000 at the start of the week. While Strategy is not buying, other buyers hold up the price. For example, spot Bitcoin funds returned to inflows last week and collected $301 million after two weeks of outflows.

This week the market waits for the Fed decision. The phase in which the biggest treasuries bought coins every week is on pause. Whether it resumes depends on the bitcoin price and on the MSCI list due on November 11.