Bitcoin tops $81,000 as Strategy mulls selling its BTC to fund dividend obligations

Bitcoin zoomed past $81,000 in Asian hours Tuesday, according to CoinDesk market data, up 6.7% on the week and riding the broader risk-on tape that has equities printing records on fading Iran tensions and renewed AI optimism.

Other crypto majors caught the bid. Solana zoomed 3% to $87.35. Dogecoin added another 4% to $0.1158, extending its weekly gain to 14.5% as futures open interest sits at year-highs. XRP, BNB and TRX all printed green on the day.

Ether is the laggard, off 0.3% over 24 hours despite holding a 3.9% weekly gain at $2,376. Spot ETH ETF flows turned negative last week, ending a three-week inflow streak.

Wall Street gauges closed at all-time highs Tuesday after President Donald Trump signaled progress toward a “final agreement” with Iran and announced a pause on Operation Project Freedom for a short period. Brent crude fell 1.7% to about $108 a barrel. The dollar, which had been the haven of choice through the US-Israel war on Iran, weakened against all its G-10 peers.

Asian equities zoomed to an all-time high on Wednesday morning, with the MSCI Asia Pacific index advancing 1.8%. South Korea’s Kospi jumped more than 6% to a record, with Samsung Electronics surging 15% to reach a $1 trillion valuation, the second Asian company ever to clear that mark.

Strong earnings from Advanced Micro Devices and Super Micro Computer added to the AI-trade momentum, with Nasdaq 100 futures up 0.6%.

A key development came as Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor told in the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call that it may sell a portion of its bitcoin holdings to fund dividend payments.

“We will probably sell some bitcoin to pay a dividend just to inoculate the market and send the message that we did it,” Saylor said.

The world’s largest corporate bitcoin holder, sitting on 818,334 $BTC at an average acquisition cost of $75,537, has not sold any of its position before. The model has always been to buy and hold.

Strategy posted a $12.54 billion Q1 net loss as bitcoin’s slide from October’s $126,000 peak weighed on the company’s mark-to-market accounting. The firm carries roughly $1.5 billion in annual dividend obligations across preferred stock and outstanding debt, with about 18 months of USD reserves to cover them at current run-rates.

MSTR shares dumped over 4% in after-hours trading on the announcement and $BTC briefly slipped under $81,000 before recovering.

Saylor framed the move as a feature of the model rather than a break from it.

“You buy bitcoin with credit, you let it appreciate, and then you sell bitcoin to pay the dividend.”

That is a different sentence than every prior Strategy quarter, where the playbook was to issue more debt or equity to fund obligations rather than touch the $BTC stack.