STRC Under Strain: Standard Chartered Calls Strategy’s BTC Sales ‘Noise’, Keeps $100K Call
BTC near $64K, down as much as 42% YTD by some counts. Chartered holds its $100K target as Strategy sells coins to defend STRC's par.
Standard Chartered is sticking with its $100,000 year-end Bitcoin target even as the asset trades well under it. ElrondScan pricing had BTC/USDT at $63,852.81, up 1.00% on 24-hour volume of $13.83 billion, in a session range of $62,926.01–$64,692.83. Decrypt separately put spot near $64,440, up 3.8% on the week but down as much as 42% year-to-date — a divergence in yearly performance figures traders should note rather than reconcile.
Positioning and the Strategy overhang
Perpetual positioning skews long, 58% versus 42% short, with funding at +0.0068% paid by longs and open interest holding near $12.5 billion, per COINOTAG data. That backdrop sits against a bank note from Geoffrey Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, who told clients the recent drawdown is “mostly noise” tied to a communications problem around Strategy’s treasury management — not a structural drop in spot demand, Decrypt reported.
Strategy remains the largest corporate BTC holder at 843,775 coins, more than 4% of the 21 million supply cap. The trigger for market unease is its pivot away from a “never sell” stance. Strategy’s mNAV — enterprise value divided by BTC holdings value — traded above 1.0 from 2020 through mid-2025, letting the firm issue equity to buy more Bitcoin faster than dilution ate into per-share exposure. With mNAV now compressing toward 1.0, that flywheel has stalled, pushing the company to lean on BTC as collateral for STRC, its perpetual preferred security.
STRC’s par slippage
STRC pays a 12% annualized dividend twice monthly, with the rate reset monthly to hold the instrument near its $100 par; outstanding notional is roughly $10 billion. Disclosed sales have varied by reporting window: a June 1 filing flagged 32 BTC sold the prior week, while Decrypt reported a larger 3,588 BTC sale — worth about $216 million — executed between June 29 and July 5 to cover preferred dividends and rebuild cash reserves. STRC broke from par on the news, falling intraday to $71.25 on June 26 before recovering toward $90.
Standard Chartered pegs Strategy’s dollar reserve for STRC dividend coverage at $2.55 billion, enough for roughly 17.4 months of payments, and calls that cushion adequate. A newly announced cash-generation program permits further occasional BTC sales, with up to $1.25 billion earmarked to refill the reserve — a mechanism the bank expects to push STRC back toward $100. Myriad prediction-market traders, per Decrypt, now give Strategy only a slim chance of holding 1 million BTC by year-end, an implicit read on how much further liquidation the market is pricing in.
A downgraded call, still standing
Context matters here: Standard Chartered has already cut this forecast twice, from $150,000 for 2024 and a $250,000 cycle-peak call for 2025 down to the current $100,000, as ETF outflows persisted and Fed rate-cut expectations faded. On the technical tape, COINOTAG’s 42-indicator composite scores $63,145 support at 80/100 and $66,578 resistance at 74/100, with the pivot at $63,868.69 and RSI(14) at 53.0 — a neutral-to-mildly-bullish reading that leaves the STRC-driven range still very much in play.
Read more: Empery Digital Halves BTC Treasury: 1,400 Coins Sold at $62.2K Average