Michael Saylor: "It's not complicated. Bitcoin is money." | Bitcoin Conference 2026

Yeah, I think STRC is an amalgam of all of the good things that we discovered on our way to the revolution and our attempt to run away from all the bad things. So, what worked really well: four-letter tickers that are available from broker-dealers on NASDAQ worked well. At-the-market shelf registrations, we thought that was a magic tool. Amplification via something other than just straight equity, we thought that was good. What we didn't like is over-the-counter 144A issues because the entire retail market and public investors were locked out. So that was bad. We didn't like debt that came due with a certain date because it created a huge amount of credit risk and uncertainty. That's bad. We didn't like the fact that we were trapped in a small set of niche corporate bond markets without a lot of flow of capital. That was bad. And so eventually we discovered preferred stock so we could sell a security to the general public everywhere in the world that was perpetual so you could attach a shelf registration to it that anybody could buy. And so STRC represented a walk down that stack to preferred. And then in the preferred world, it represented the shortest duration, least delta, most stable, least volatile security. And so I would say it represents the highest amount of financial engineering we've done. But the result of that was the simplest product we'd ever created. It's just like when the iPhone didn't have a keyboard. It's like fewer moving parts. So, by the time the dust settles, STRC just becomes a Bitcoin-backed high-yield bank account that pays you double digits. And the last part, just serendipitous, was that we found that if you sell a credit instrument and then you make a capital investment forever, then you hold the capital forever, then the dividends that we pay on the credit instrument become a return of capital. So we created the most tax-efficient perpetual instrument because of the total simplicity of the idea which is make a capital investment forever, strip the volatility and the risk off of it and convert the capital gain into a defined dividend stream that's tax-deferred. And I guess we had to do everything else to get there.

Just try to make as much money as possible. It's not a complicated goal. Bitcoin is money. We want to acquire the Bitcoin. We expect Bitcoin to go up forever. It turns out that if you want to pay a tax-deferred dividend, then you need to monetize an unrealized capital gain. And so if we sell a million dollars of STRC and we buy a million dollars of Bitcoin and Bitcoin appreciates 30% a year, then we've got a big capital gain in the Bitcoin, you want to monetize that in a tax-efficient way. There are two ways to do it that are pretty obvious. One way would be to sell the Bitcoin as long as the tax basis is higher than the sale price. So if you can sell high-basis Bitcoin then you can actually generate a cash stream to pay the dividend just with the Bitcoin itself. The easier way is you sell a derivative of the Bitcoin, a derivative of the capital asset and it happens that we have a derivative and the derivative is MSTR, the common equity. So when we're selling the common equity, we're selling a derivative to generate tax-deferred income that we can pay back to the credit investors. And when we're selling the equity at a premium to the underlying NAV, then it turns out to be accretive to the common stock and a benefit to the credit investor. So what we generally do is we use the equity ATM in order to generate the cash stream to pay the credit investors. Most of the amplification for the equity comes from the credit. If you sell a million dollars of credit, then you've got a million dollars of Bitcoin and you didn't actually dilute the shares at all over the course of the next year. You'll issue 10 or 11%. But what you're doing really is you're generating massive upfront amplification. Another way to amplify is you just sell equity at a premium to NAV. If you sell a million dollars of equity at MNAV of two, then you've created $500,000 of BTC gains. That's also amplification. We've done that. In the future, we may do more of that. We do it occasionally. We did it last week. We sold $255 million worth of equity at a premium. We generated a Bitcoin gain and some amplification on that and we expanded our capital base to support the credit issuance. But for the most part, if we sell, you know, if we sell 10 billion dollars of STRC, we'll generate a 10 billion gain on that upfront. So most of the BTC gain and the yield comes from the credit not from the equity right now.

Yeah. Well, what we realized is the three-layer stack is going to be digital capital like a 30 to 40 ARR, 30 to 40 vol commodity, digital credit about a 10, 11% yielding instrument. And then the third layer is digital money or digital yield. And digital money would be a zero-vol, a pure money market type instrument that pays something better than normal money market. So maybe zero-vol 8%. Or in that range. So one compelling thing you can do with credit is create digital money. And you can create digital money in the form of an ETF or an ETP or you can create it as a token or you can create it as an account. So, I think important integrations are integrating STRC into public ETFs in order to create that sort of instrument. I think integrating it into crypto exchanges. At some point, some crypto exchange will just offer you a digital yield account or digital money account that pays 8%. You just put your money on the exchange, they pay you 8% for your money on deposit. And then I think the third is the emerging class of savings coins. There's a $350 billion stablecoin market. A lot of them want to generate yield on the stablecoin. So the way that works is you buy the stablecoin, you stake the stablecoin, you get back a savings coin or a yield-bearing coin and STRC powers the yield on savings coins. In fact, I would say everybody's looking for how do I generate yield on Bitcoin or how do I generate yield on stablecoins and so STRC or digital credit is like an ideal way to generate that yield on either of those. And you can do it on-chain, you can do it via DeFi protocol and people are working on it with DeFi protocols in the Bitcoin world and the stablecoin world. Or you can do it probably on a centralized exchange or you could do it with a bank. Right now I think I see about a dozen projects that are going on in this area. Maybe 12 to 24. It's exploding and all of those are different approaches. There's an explosion of entrepreneurial activity right now.