Did Saylor’s Strategy sell
$BTC last week?
Last week’s BTC price action made a lot of people think Strategy sold thousands of BTC to raise cash and extend STRC runway.
The thesis made sense.
Some people argued there was no way Strategy sold >$1B because there was no visible onchain trace.
Others argued the opposite: Arkham, the main tool for tracking Strategy flows, does not label every custodial wallet at client level, so the answer is not obvious.
So who is right?
We spent time tagging hundreds of wallets.
Here’s what we found.
First, the facts.
1) It starts with Fidelity custody
Strategy does not hold all its BTC in self-custody, it uses three custodians: Coinbase Custody, Anchorage, and Fidelity Digital Assets.
That means any serious attempt to find missing Strategy addresses has to start from the custodians.
During the May 26 to May 31 filing period, Strategy sold 32 BTC at an average net price of $77,135/BTC.
The 8-K did not disclose an address, so the first step was to find a matching flow.
The reported $77,135/BTC price points to May 26 inside that filing window.
On the pricing data we checked, BTC traded around that level between roughly 9:50 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. ET.
Among the custody flows we checked, the only transfer matching the reported amount came from an address labeled under Fidelity custody:
arkm.com/explorer/tx/423619f…
This does not prove the sale by itself, but iIt gives us the starting point.
You can check the Fidelity Custody entity here:
arkm.com/explorer/entity/fid…
2) Fidelity custody withdrawals
At first glance, Arkham’s Fidelity custody balance shows more than 50,000 BTC leaving over the last month. That would fit the theory that Strategy sold BTC custodied with Fidelity.
But after checking the flows, the issue looked different. Arkham had not labeled some transfers from last month, so the chart overstated real withdrawals and understated internal rotations.
To test it, we tagged the missing wallets.
3) Rotation or sales?
On those missing wallets, we saw both: some BTC rotated into fresh wallets and is still sitting there
some BTC was deposited into CEXs / MMs.
Between June 1 and June 5, $255-265M (4,300-4,500) BTC were transferred to CEXs / MMs.
Does that mean Strategy sold BTC? Not by itself.
4) Fidelity custody customers
Strategy is not the only customer using Fidelity custody, so a Fidelity custody outflow does not automatically mean Strategy sold.
The cleanest sanity check is to compare CEX / MM flows against known Fidelity-side redemption pressure.
The main public flow large enough to matter is Fidelity’s own spot Bitcoin ETF, FBTC.
Between June 1 and June 5, FBTC saw roughly $202M of net outflows, equal to about 3,000 BTC.
So to recap:
> 4,300 - 4,500 BTC moved from Fidelity-linked wallets to CEXs / MMs
> FBTC had roughly 3,000 BTC of redemption pressure
> Other customers or their ETPs could have also sell a significant amount of BTC (let’s assume 300-500 BTC)
This leaves us with 1,000 BTC ($63M) missing so this means one thing:
Strategy could have sold BTC, but not a large amount as many people expected, or at least not from the Fidelity-custodied coins.
Since the residual is still relatively small and we could have missed some addresses, our base case is that Strategy did not sell a meaningful amount of BTC last week.
The next 8-K should give the official answer. It will be published in the next few hours.
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