Strive Inc., the Columbus, Ohio-based Bitcoin treasury company co-founded by Ohio Gubernatorial Candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, has crossed a threshold that would have seemed far-fetched. It now ranks among the ten largest publicly traded corporate holders of Bitcoin in the world. 

In the days surrounding its earnings disclosure this week, Strive confirmed it had purchased 317 additional Bitcoin, pushing total holdings to 13,628 BTC as of March 17, 2026. At current prices hovering around $70,000 per coin, that stack carries a market value just shy of $1 billion, making Strive one of the more consequential new entrants to a leaderboard that has historically been dominated by the likes of Strategy, Marathon Digital, and a small cluster of Bitcoin miners.

Bitcoin has been under pressure in 2026, sliding more than 45% from its October 2025 peak near $126,000 down toward the low-to-mid $60,000s in early March before recovering recently. For a company whose entire model is built around accumulating the asset as cheaply as possible relative to the number of shares outstanding, a bear market is arguably an opportunity. Strive's management frames it precisely that way, pointing to a metric they call Bitcoin Yield, which measures how much Bitcoin the company has added per diluted share regardless of price. That figure came in at 22.2% for Q4 2025 alone.

 

What The Q4 Numbers Actually Mean

Digging into the earnings release filed with the SEC on March 19, the headline GAAP loss of $393.6 million looks alarming in isolation. The non-GAAP adjusted net loss attributable to common stockholders was a smaller but still substantial $208.2 million, with a diluted loss per share of $4.73 after accounting for the company's 1-for-20 reverse stock split.

The gap between those two figures reflects the particular accounting treatment of Bitcoin holdings under relatively recent FASB guidance. Unrealized losses on digital assets flow through the income statement, meaning that as Bitcoin fell from its October peak through December 31, those paper losses showed up in full on the P&L. The inverse would be true in a rising market, and indeed Strive reported a Bitcoin Dollar Gain of $114.3 million for Q4 and a further $78.2 million through mid-March.

On the balance sheet, the company held $668.5 million in digital assets at fair value as of December 31, 2025, with $67.5 million in cash. A follow-on offering of its Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Preferred Stock, marketed under the ticker SATA, added roughly $109.2 million in net proceeds in January 2026. The SATA instrument has become central to Strive's funding model: investors buy the preferred shares at around $100 apiece, collect a quarterly dividend currently yielding 12.75% annualized, and Strive takes that capital straight into the Bitcoin market.

 

 

Buying Strategy's Preferred Stock

Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising move in recent weeks was Strive's decision to deploy $50 million into Strategy Inc.'s perpetual preferred stock, known as STRC, which currently yields 11.5%. In other words, one Bitcoin treasury company is now using its balance sheet to buy the preferred equity of another Bitcoin treasury company. Both firms are simultaneously accumulating Bitcoin and investing in each other's capital structures.

Strategy, which holds 738,731 BTC and remains by far the largest corporate holder, is itself under pressure: MSTR shares have declined every month this year and are down more than 51% from their peak. The shared exposure to a single asset means that a sustained Bitcoin downturn would stress every link in this chain at roughly the same moment.

That said, for Strive, the STRC investment has a certain logic. At 11.5% yield on a $50 million position, it generates income that can be used to service SATA dividends or fund further BTC purchases without liquidating any actual Bitcoin. The company gets dollar-denominated cash flow from a security whose ultimate collateral is also Bitcoin. Whether that makes the trade elegant or doubly risky depends heavily on where Bitcoin goes next. Strive is betting that direction is up and to the right.

 

 

Wall Street Is Paying Attention

B. Riley launched coverage of Strive earlier this month with a Buy rating and a $12 price target, citing the company's dual-engine model as an underappreciated value driver. Analyst Fedor Shabalin made the case that the market has not yet assigned meaningful value to Strive's asset management business, which oversees roughly $2.5 billion in assets separately from the Bitcoin treasury. With shares trading around $8.51 at the time, that $12 target implies roughly 40% upside, but it also positions B. Riley as far more conservative than the stock's own 52-week high of $268 would suggest was once in play.

The initiation note also highlighted a key sensitivity: every $1,000 move in Bitcoin translates to approximately $13.1 million in treasury value for Strive. At 13,628 BTC, the company's fortunes are tightly tethered to a single price feed. That is, of course, the entire point. Strive is not trying to hedge Bitcoin; it is trying to accumulate as much of it as possible per share outstanding, and then let the market decide what that is worth.

 

 

BTC Treasury Race

Strive's entry into the top-10 comes against a backdrop of explosive growth in corporate Bitcoin adoption. According to data tracked by Bitcointreasuries.net, the number of publicly listed companies worldwide holding Bitcoin as a treasury asset crossed 200 in 2025, up from fewer than 30 before that year. The pace of adoption has outrun even optimistic projections made at the time of the first U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF approvals in January 2024.

Tesla sits on 11,509 BTC and has not meaningfully added to its position since late 2024, which allowed Strive, at 13,311 BTC following its March 11 purchase, to move past Elon Musk's automaker on the public company leaderboard. CleanSpark, Marathon Digital, and others in the mining space remain ahead, but the distinction between miner and pure-play treasury holder is blurring as more non-mining companies pursue the same accumulation strategy.

Fidelity Digital Assets has argued that Bitcoin can serve as a hedge against currency debasement and fiscal instability, a view that has gained traction among CFOs navigating an environment of persistent deficits and geopolitical uncertainty. Strive's pitch to shareholders is essentially that argument distilled into a public equity vehicle, one that offers exposure to Bitcoin's upside while layering in financial engineering designed to compound that exposure faster than holding the coin directly.

Vivek Ramaswamy founded Strive in 2022 alongside former Anheuser-Busch president Anson Frericks with backing from Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and Bill Ackman. The firm's original identity was aggressively anti-ESG and anti-DEI, positioning itself as the antidote to what Ramaswamy called the politicization of corporate America by the BlackRocks and Vanguards of the world. Ramaswamy stepped back from day-to-day involvement in early 2023 to run for president, and though he lost to Trump in the primaries, he ultimately endorsed him and parlayed the campaign into a political profile that kept him relevant.

The Bitcoin pivot came in September 2025 under CEO Matt Cole, who repositioned the entire enterprise around the treasury strategy. Ramaswamy has remained involved as a figurehead and public voice, even as the operational direction shifted substantially. The anti-ESG brand has receded; what remains is a company that pitches itself as the first publicly traded asset management firm to adopt Bitcoin as its primary treasury asset.

The SATA preferred stock has been described internally as a form of long-duration equity, and demand has at times surprised the company's own projections. Investor appetite reportedly exceeded $600 million at one point, allowing Strive to upsize its offering to $225 million. The instrument trades on Nasdaq and has generally held close to its $100 par value, though it was recently quoted around $96, reflecting some softness tied to broader crypto market conditions.

 

 

The End Game

Strive has been clear about its intentions. The company wants to monetize Clinivanta, raise additional capital through preferred equity issuances, and buy more Bitcoin. Whether the market awards it a premium over net asset value depends largely on Bitcoin's trajectory and investors' willingness to pay for the financial engineering on top of the underlying asset.

Right now, that premium is not there. With ASST shares trading at roughly 0.9 times modified NAV, the market is essentially saying the business operations and the leverage strategy add no value, or even detract from it. B. Riley disagrees, pointing to the asset management business as an overlooked driver. Prediction markets currently assign a 38.5% probability to Bitcoin hitting $100,000 by the end of 2026. If that happens, Strive's $1 billion treasury becomes a $1.4 billion treasury and the math starts looking a lot more attractive to equity holders.

For the moment, the company sits in a paradox familiar to anyone who has watched Strategy over the past few years: the asset is underperforming from its peak, the stock is down sharply, and yet the conviction that the trade is right has only deepened. Strive added 317 BTC this week. It will almost certainly add more.