Is Corporate Bitcoin Buying Coming Back? Strategy Added Only 1,666 BTC in Q3, Down From 83,901 in Q2

What the numbers say

Here is the Q3 picture, with the source of each figure.

Two other facts sit next to those. Rasmussen said a dozen companies that entered during the 2025 treasury boom sold their entire holdings in Q3, mostly to repay debt or return cash to shareholders after their stock premiums vanished, and Bitwise's October report shows fewer bitcoin treasuries at the end of the quarter. And US spot bitcoin ETFs lost about $229 million last week, their second straight week of net withdrawals, according to SoSoValue data cited by Cointelegraph.

Bitwise's own Q4 2026 market review, published on October 8, describes the third quarter as one of crypto's best: its 10 Large Cap Crypto Index rose 46.39%, spot bitcoin ETFs took in roughly $6 billion (about $3.5 billion of it in August), and tokenized stocks rose 65.5% to a record near $3.2 billion. So the slowdown in treasury buying happened while ETF money was coming in, which tells you the two sources of demand are not the same thing.

Why the old playbook stopped working

The 2025 model was simple. A listed company sold shares to investors at a price above the value of the bitcoin it owned, used the cash to buy more bitcoin, and the share count rose while bitcoin per share did not fall. That only works while the stock trades at a premium. Bitfinex's head of derivatives Jag Kooner told Cointelegraph that premiums have collapsed, some companies have sold into weakness, and investors now judge these businesses on funding costs, balance-sheet discipline and bitcoin per share. He said "a return to last year's indiscriminate capital raising looks unlikely."

You can see the same strain in this week's biggest buyer. Decrypt reported that Strive bought 4,045 BTC for about $335 million, taking holdings to 36,818 BTC, with the cash coming from investors exercising warrants (about $369.2 million raised on October 12 and 13). The cost was dilution: Class A shares outstanding rose from 101.2 million to 114.8 million in a week, about 13.5%. Strive also priced a new 15% perpetual preferred stock, "SATS," at $90 for about $630 million of expected proceeds. Meanwhile Strategy bought only 267 BTC (about $22.1 million) last week while spending $193.1 million on buying back its own STRC preferred stock, taking its total to 848,517 BTC.

Decrypt also notes that MSCI finalized a rule on October 15 aimed at "non-operating companies": companies that fail its screens would be dropped from its indexes at the close of November 30, with the final list due on November 11. We have not read MSCI's own notice, so treat that as Decrypt's description, not a confirmed list of affected companies.

What analysts expect next

Rasmussen told Cointelegraph he expects corporate purchases to start re-accelerating as early as this year. Kooner's condition is narrower: buying returns if treasury companies regain premiums to the value of their bitcoin. He expects established players with scale and liquidity to get capital first, and warned that "a broad wave of new listings would most likely arrive late in a rally, once premiums have widened and that timing is itself a warning sign."

Rasmussen also said most of the largest corporate buyers outside Strategy are operating businesses adding bitcoin from cash flow, which he called "a smaller source of demand but a healthier one." And ETF demand can sustain a recovery for a while, Kooner said, although part of it comes from basis trades that can unwind quickly.

Where bitcoin trades now

Binance daily candles show BTC/USDT closed at $81,938.40 on October 19 and traded near $81,800 on October 20. Over the last 30 daily candles the high was $87,395.67 and the low $79,800.00, a range of about 9.5% (our arithmetic: 87,395.67 ÷ 79,800 − 1). Strive's weekly average purchase price of about $82,803 per coin and Strategy's about $82,900 are close to today's price, so the big treasuries are not sitting on large unrealized gains at this level.

Perpetual funding for BTC is near neutral: the Binance rate is 0.0091% per eight hours and OKX's is 0.0100%, from the venues' public data this morning. When funding is near zero, leveraged traders are not paying a large premium to be long, which fits a market waiting for a catalyst.

How to act on this

Corporate buying is a headline, not a trading signal. A weekly announcement tells you what a company did with its own financing, and by the time it is public the coins are already bought. If you want bitcoin exposure, decide your size first, spread purchases over several days, and avoid sizing positions on the assumption that a treasury company will keep absorbing supply. Costs add up for repeated small buys: Bitget charges 0.1% maker and 0.1% taker on spot, and with code nexu888 you get an automatic fee rebate through NexuAlpha. The Bitget profile explains settlement and our fee comparison lines up the other venues. If you trade BTC perpetuals, read the funding board before you hold overnight.

More on the companies behind these numbers is in the news archive, including our coverage of Strategy's STRC buyback and the Solana treasury sale.

What we could not verify

We could not read Bitwise's full Q3 treasury dataset, only the figures Rasmussen supplied to Cointelegraph and Bitwise's public summary, so the Q2 and Q3 company totals are as reported. We did not read MSCI's own announcement. Analyst expectations are opinions, not data.

Quick answers

Is corporate bitcoin buying slowing down? Yes. Strategy added a net 1,666 BTC in Q3 against 83,901 in Q2, and other public companies added 5,617 against 45,725, per figures Bitwise supplied to Cointelegraph.

Why did it slow? Share premiums to bitcoin value collapsed, which made issuing new shares to buy bitcoin less attractive, and a dozen smaller treasury companies sold out.

Will it come back? Analysts expect buying to pick up if bitcoin rallies, but more selectively and with established companies first. That is an expectation, not a fact.

Are ETFs making up the difference? Partly. Spot bitcoin ETFs took in about $6.4 billion in Q3 according to Rasmussen, but lost about $229 million last week.

Does this change how I should buy bitcoin? It means you should not count on treasury companies as a steady buyer. Size your position for your own horizon and spread your entries.