Michael Saylor (마이클 세일러), chairman of Strategy, said the company’s recent bitcoin sale was not a change in investment strategy but a measure to maintain dividend-type securities and bitcoin-based digital credit products.

On June 13, Cointelegraph reported that Saylor said at the BTC Prague event in the Czech Republic that “Strategy must maintain the ability to sell bitcoin.” He said, “That way, we can continue to issue digital credit products.”

The remarks came after Strategy said in a June 1 filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it sold 32 BTC. It was the company’s first officially reported bitcoin sale since 2022.

Saylor has repeatedly delivered the message, “Never sell bitcoin,” prompting market criticism that the sale could conflict with his long-held philosophy.

Saylor explained that even companies using a bitcoin treasury strategy must maintain liquidity to dispose of holdings if necessary. He said, “If a company’s policy is fixed at ‘never sell bitcoin,’ credit cannot have value and stock cannot have value.” He argued that operating dividend-type securities and credit products backed by bitcoin requires a structure that can convert collateral assets into cash as needed.

Saylor presented Strategy’s preferred stock product STRC as a representative example. He defined STRC as a “digital credit” product issued based on the company’s bitcoin balance sheet and said such securities are a key tool for raising funds to buy additional bitcoin.

He described the digital credit market as a next-generation growth area for the financial sector. Saylor said, “If bitcoin is the digital transformation of capital, STRC is the digital transformation of credit.” He claimed digital credit products can offer returns of up to about 8 percent, which he said is 3 to 4 times higher than traditional deposit products.

He added that such structures are already being affected by market volatility. Apix Finance’s synthetic stablecoin apxUSD, which Saylor cited as an example, broke its $1 peg on June 4 and fell to $0.90.

At the time, bitcoin fell below $63,000 and STRC, a key collateral asset, also dropped below its $100 par value. Apix Finance said the main causes of the de-pegging were a drop in collateral value, reduced market liquidity and an expansion of derivatives-driven trading. As of the time of writing, apxUSD was trading around $0.96 and had not fully regained the $1 peg.

The industry assesses that the remarks show Strategy’s bitcoin strategy is expanding beyond simple accumulation toward building an ecosystem of dividend-type securities and credit products based on bitcoin. Saylor also sees a structure that creates credit using bitcoin as collateral as offering a bigger market opportunity than simply holding bitcoin. Recent cases also showed that if bitcoin prices and related securities prices fall at the same time, such digital credit models could come under significant pressure.

Market focus is shifting from how much bitcoin treasury companies accumulate to how stably they can operate credit products and dividend structures backed by those holdings.

Analysts say the bitcoin sale Saylor emphasized this time is meaningful not as a retreat from an accumulation strategy but as an operational tool to sustain a bitcoin-based financial product ecosystem.