The bitcoin numbers from March are hard to ignore and are bullish at first glance. Public and private companies collectively added 47,435 $BTC to their treasuries last month — worth roughly $3.2 billion at month-end prices — but strip away one name from the ledger and the picture shifts dramatically.
Nearly every one of those coins was bought by Michael Saylor’s Strategy. Everyone else, collectively, is in retreat, according to bitcointreasuries.net March report shared with Bitcoin Magazine.
That divergence is becoming the defining story of corporate Bitcoin adoption in 2026. Strategy purchased 44,377 $BTC in March alone, including one of its largest-ever single-week purchases — 22,337 $BTC disclosed on March 16, funded by $1.57 billion in ATM sales from its STRC preferred shares and MSTR common stock.
The company now controls two-thirds of all Bitcoin held by public companies, and its holdings sit at roughly 762,000 $BTC with a plausible, if aggressive, path to 1 million.
STRC is helping Strategy build an accumulation machine
To understand how Strategy keeps buying at this scale in what BitcoinTreasuries.net describes as “a bear market,” you have to understand STRC — the company’s variable-rate perpetual preferred share product.
STRC targets a price near $100 and currently yields approximately 11.5% annually, reset monthly. It sits above common shareholders in Strategy’s capital structure, offering more predictable returns than MSTR stock while still being anchored to the Bitcoin treasury underneath.
March was a watershed moment for the instrument. STRC recorded its highest-ever single-day trading volume on March 12 — $746 million — followed by its second-highest on March 31, at $522 million. Weekly volumes hit $2.27 billion from March 9–13 alone. That demand didn’t just set records; it funded Bitcoin buying.
Strategy’s 8-K for the week of March 9–15 reported $1.2 billion in STRC ATM proceeds and $396 million in MSTR proceeds, together financing that record 22,337 $BTC purchase.
Now Strategy has filed for a new $42 billion ATM program, split evenly between STRC and MSTR, plus an additional $2.1 billion in STRK. According to BitcoinTreasuries.net modeling, if proceeds arrive at a rate of roughly $2.3 billion monthly over 19 months — and Bitcoin hovers near $75,000 — Strategy could reach 1 million $BTC by November 2026.
A more conservative projection using Strategy’s average monthly buy rate of 21,000 $BTC since January 2025 pushes that date to March 2027.
A Bitcoin leaderboard in freefall
March also triggered a major leaderboard reshuffling that reflects just how different the playbook looks outside of Saylor’s orbit. MARA Holdings — once the second-largest public Bitcoin treasury — sold 15,133 $BTC, worth roughly $1.1 billion, to repurchase convertible senior notes. The sale wiped nearly 28% of its previous holdings.
As BitcoinTreasuries.net’s Tyler Rowe put it: “MARA borrowed aggressively to stack sats during the bull run and is now selling Bitcoin at a loss to service that debt. This is the precise scenario critics of debt-fueled treasury strategies have warned about.”
That opened the door for Jack Mallers’ Twenty One Capital (XXI) to move into second place, currently holding 43,514 $BTC — though notably, XXI hasn’t purchased Bitcoin since August. Its rise is purely a function of MARA’s decline. Metaplanet, the Japanese firm that has become one of the most aggressive Bitcoin accumulators outside the U.S., followed in early April by acquiring 5,075 $BTC to reach 40,177 $BTC, leapfrogging MARA for third place.
GameStop’s story is perhaps the most unusual. The retailer-turned-crypto-treasury pledged 4,709 $BTC as collateral in a covered call strategy with Coinbase Credit, leaving just 1 $BTC in direct holdings.
The counterparty holds rights to sell or rehypothecate the pledged Bitcoin, though GameStop maintains a contractual right to receive an equivalent amount back. The move dropped the company from the 21st-largest Bitcoin holder to near position 190 on the leaderboard.
Public company bitcoin accumulation is stalling
Beyond the leaderboard drama, the March report surfaced a quieter but more important trend: excluding Strategy, corporate Bitcoin conviction is cooling sharply. Public companies other than Strategy aggressively accumulated last summer, but net buying has declined and outright sales have accelerated since October.
The number of monthly buyers has fallen steadily since September, reaching just 16 in March.
Ryan Strauss of the Bitcoin Consulting Group put it bluntly in the report: “What stands out to me is just how structurally dependent headline holdings growth is on Strategy — once you remove it, the underlying signal flips from strength to clear deceleration. The pullback in both net accumulation and participant count suggests this isn’t just noise, but a broad cooling in corporate conviction following last summer’s aggressive positioning.”
Among the sellers: Exodus Movement, whose Bitcoin holdings fell by an estimated 1,084 $BTC as it funds its acquisition of W3C Corp; Fold Inc., down 178 $BTC; and Cango Inc., down 331.3 $BTC following a mining update.
A new financial ecosystem forming around STRC
What may be most significant about March isn’t the buying or selling — it’s the emerging ecosystem of financial products being built around STRC itself. At least five entities have disclosed allocations to STRC or plans to acquire it. Strive, the asset manager led by CEO Matt Cole, has committed $50 million — over one-third of its corporate treasury — calling STRC “an alternative to a USD reserve mainly made up of cash in low-yield money market funds”.
DeFi protocol Apyx, which describes itself as the first dividend-backed stablecoin, held approximately 450,000 STRC shares worth $45 million as of early April, using the yield to back its apxUSD stablecoin.
Meanwhile, mutual funds and ETFs now hold more than $2 billion in digital credit products in aggregate, with STRC alone accounting for $591 million across datasets from Capital Group, BlackRock, Fidelity, VanEck, and others.
BitcoinTreasuries.net frames this institutional on-ramp as particularly timely amid a private credit crisis in which some issuers have restricted retail fund withdrawals or capped redemptions — a structurally opaque system that, the report argues, compares unfavorably to Bitcoin-backed digital credit where collateral is on-chain and pricing is publicly visible.
Overall, the broader takeaway from March 2026: corporate Bitcoin adoption is not weakening, but it is concentrating. Strategy isn’t just the biggest player — it is increasingly the market itself, with an expanding financial architecture designed to keep accumulating regardless of where the price goes.
This post Strategy’s (MSTR) Bitcoin Ambition Is Reshaping Corporate Finance. Everyone Else Is Falling Behind first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.