According to Fixygen, the strategies of the largest public companies that have built up cryptocurrency reserves began to diverge significantly in September.
Strategy, the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, has not purchased any BTC for the second week in a row. Instead, the company allocated approximately $139.3 million to repurchase its own STRC preferred shares.
As of September 13, Strategy held approximately 845.05 thousand BTC, purchased for a total of $63.73 billion. The average purchase price was about $75.4 thousand per Bitcoin.
In other words, the company temporarily redirected part of its free liquidity from Bitcoin accumulation toward managing its own capital structure.
For Strategy, the STRC buyback makes economic sense, as it allows the company to reduce future dividend obligations if the securities trade below their par value of $100. The company announced back in the summer that it intends to regularly repurchase STRC at a significant discount.
BitMine Immersion Technologies is pursuing a completely opposite strategy.
On September 14, the company reported that it had increased its reserves to 5.96 million ETH, which corresponds to approximately 4.9% of Ethereum’s total supply of 122 million tokens.
Over the course of the week, BitMine acquired an additional 27,000 ETH, bringing it closer to its goal of holding 5% of Ethereum’s supply.
The company estimates the total value of its crypto assets and cash reserves at approximately $15.8 billion.
The difference between the two models is becoming increasingly apparent. Strategy is effectively building a financial company centered on Bitcoin and managing a complex system of common stock, preferred securities, and debt capital.
BitMine, on the other hand, is trying to accumulate Ethereum as quickly as possible while simultaneously capitalizing on the opportunity to generate income from staking.
This divergence points to the next stage in the development of companies managing digital assets: the market is beginning to evaluate not only the quantity of accumulated coins, but also the method of financing, the cost of capital, the return on assets, and the risk of dilution for shareholders.
