Bitcoin treasury company Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) is accumulating Bitcoin at a rate exceeding the total miner output, resulting in the supply-capped cryptocurrency experiencing an annual deflation rate of approximately 2.33%, claims Ki Young Ju, CEO of crypto market analytics firm CryptoQuant.
CryptoQuant CEO Claims Strategy Is Accumulating More Bitcoin Than Miner Output, Significantly Shrinking Its Supply
Ju wrote in a May 10 X post that the firm’s 555,000 BTC holdings, worth around $57 billion, are illiquid as it has no plans to sell the coins, contributing significantly to Bitcoin’s shrinking available supply.
Strategy’s executive chairman, Michael Saylor, is a Bitcoin evangelist who has inspired many other corporations to adopt a treasury plan incorporating the apex cryptocurrency. Executives at Metaplanet and Semler Scientific claim that their shares are up double and triple digits since following Strategy’s Bitcoin playbook and emerging from a “zombie” status this year.
Zombie companies earn just enough to continue operations and service their debts, but have no excess capital available to spur growth and are often close to becoming bankrupt. Strategy was considered a zombie company until Saylor convinced its board of directors to adopt a Bitcoin strategy in August 2020, turning it into a corporate behemoth in under five years.
In an interview with CNBC last year, Saylor said that investors should treat Bitcoin less like a currency and more like a “billion-dollar building in cyberspace” with the ability to preserve capital for hundreds of years. Commenting on its impact, he claimed that Bitcoin is “going to eat” into gold and has all the great attributes of the asset but possesses none of its defects.
Saylor argued that Bitcoin is global, the most widely recognized and trusted investment asset in the world, and is ethical because no issuer or company controls it.
13,000 Institutions and 814,000 Retail Investors Have Direct Exposure To Strategy’s BTC-Backed MSTR Stock
Strategy plays a crucial role in bridging traditional financial markets (TradFi) and Bitcoin by raising capital from investors through corporate debt and equity sales, which the company uses to finance its BTC purchases. This gives shareholders direct exposure to BTC and feeds capital from TradFi into the Bitcoin market.
Saylor routinely posts the Bitcoin chart on Sunday, which signals an imminent BTC acquisition on Mondays. In an April 20 X post, he followed up on the chart with a breakdown of the investor exposure to Strategy, stating that as of Q1 2025, more than 13,000 institutions and 814,000 retail investors directly hold its MSTR stock, and that an estimated 55 million beneficiaries are indirectly exposed to the company’s performance through ETFs, mutual funds, pensions, and insurance portfolios.
In December 2024, Strategy was added to the Nasdaq 100, a stock market index comprising 100 of the largest non-financial domestic and international companies listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, selected based on market capitalization. As of May 2025, the total market cap of the Nasdaq-100 is approximately $25.34 trillion.
Strategy’s Nasdaq-100 inclusion has drawn in even more capital into Bitcoin from passive investors holding the tech-focused index in their portfolios.
Bitcoin investors keep a close watch on Strategy and its effect on market dynamics. The company’s plan spearheading the institutional adoption of Bitcoin further restricts the supply of available coins, resulting in increased prices and dampening volatility. Bitcoin has a circulating supply of 19.86 million coins, leaving only 1.14 million BTC to be mined.
Critics Argue Strategy Is “Synthetically” Halving Bitcoin Supply
Adam Livingston, Bitcoin analyst and author of “The Bitcoin Age and The Great Harvest”, recently said that Saylor’s company is “synthetically halving” BTC by purchasing half or more of the newly minted supply from miners every month.
According to his analysis, the current collective daily miner output is approximately 450 BTC, but Strategy acquired 379,800 BTC in the last six months. This translates to the company accumulating an average of 2,087 BTC daily, far exceeding the amount miners produce.
He predicted that this trend would cause Bitcoin to become a scarce asset, requiring investors to pay a premium to access it, and lending against Bitcoin will cost more as borrowing will turn into a luxury business run by nation-states and corporate whales that control a sizeable chunk of the supply. Livingston also warned that Bitcoin’s global cost of capital will no longer be set by the market, instead, it will be set by the “gravitational policies” of Strategy – the world’s first Bitcoin superpower.
Blockstream CEO and renowned cypherpunk Adam Back predicted that the Bitcoin corporate treasury plan adopted by Strategy and other institutions would drive the crypto asset’s market capitalization to $200 trillion. Institutions like hedge funds, pension funds, asset managers, and tech companies continue to accumulate BTC as a portfolio diversifier or a treasury asset to hedge against fiat currency-led inflation.
Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have helped stabilize BTC’s price by injecting fresh capital from TradeFi markets, smoothing out its volatility, and making downturns less severe.
SkyBridge founder and Bitcoin advocate Anthony Scaramucci noted that the more august institutional players, like sovereign wealth funds, will take a step back on Bitcoin accumulation until a comprehensive cryptocurrency regulatory framework is established in the United States.
Saifudean Ammous Dismisses Claims That High Concentration of Corporate Holdings Threatens Bitcoin
Strategy’s critics argue that its debt-based approach to acquiring Bitcoin could affect its financial standing if a prolonged bear market takes effect, and such a high concentration of the digital currency held by a single entity could lead to greater systemic risk.
However, Saifedean Ammous, author of “The Bitcoin Standard” and host of ‘The Bitcoin Standard’ podcast, dismissed the claims, arguing that institutions like BlackRock and Strategy holding high concentrations of BTC do not threaten the protocol as it cannot engineer a hard fork of the blockchain to increase its supply. He said that such an event would massively devalue their holdings, which ultimately belong to shareholders with the power to divest.
“At the time of writing, Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at $102,554, down 1.35% over the last 24 hours”.