Jesse Myers@Croesus_BTC
STRC down to $82.6 today. Here's my read:
1. Strategy is fine. If everything stays as is, they can pay STRC dividends for 32 years. If BTC appreciates at ~2% CAGR, they can pay dividends indefinitely.
2. Why the sell-off? This appears to be a liquidation cascade.
Over the last 6 months, the narrative became that STRC volatility was reducing, and price began to spend all its time in $99-100 range.
This invites leverage. If you expect the price to always be north of $95, you can take on 20x leverage with your portfolio to buy more STRC and dramatically increase the yield on your portfolio.
This works great, until it doesn't.
STRC is designed as a free-market asset. When attention shifted to SATA and STRC price flagged, it may have raised the attention of opportunistic short-selling hedge funds.
By shorting aggressively, they could push the price down and start triggering margin calls and liquidations from folks who aggressively levered up their STRC positions.
The price action today is a clear liquidation cascade, rapidly pushing prices lower, in turn triggering additional liquidations.
3.
What happens now? The market will heal itself.
Opportunistic hedge funds will recognize that this is a firesale and the fundamentals are unchanged for STRC and step in as buyers. Shorts will close, becoming buyers. Individuals are getting a tremendous entry price for long-term holding STRC shares.
Buyers at this level will get ~13.7% effective yield. If STRC trades back to $100 and they sell, they get an easy +18% return.
4.
What will Strategy do?
Strategy will likely increase the dividend rate on June 30 - maybe to 11.75% but possibly to 12%. Buyers at the current price level then would get 14.2% effective yield from that point forward.
Strategy may also step in to buy STRC shares back. They could do this by issuing new shares of MSTR (currently at 1.14 mNAV) or by taking on traditional debt and deploying those funds to buy discounted STRC shares on the market.
If/when STRC trades back to $100, Strategy could then re-issue those STRC shares. The ~$15 delta per share could be used to buy BTC as pure accretion to MSTR holders, with no net change to amplification.
No doubt that Saylor has already at least considered this, and it wouldn't surprise me if they're currently doing this.
5.
In summary...
The market is freaked out that this depeg is like Terra/Luna... but this is not an asset like that. Strategy's balance sheet determines whether STRC continues to receive dividend payments... and Strategy's balance sheet is completely unchanged.
This is a leverage wipeout.
From this, the market will learn that Digital Credit is mostly very low volatility. But because it is a free market asset, the longer that a Digital Credit instrument trades within a tight range to par... the more leverage will inevitably pile up as people get greedy.
And that creates the conditions for a leverage wipeout depeg. Following that, the instrument will make its way back to par value as the market heals itself and recognizes that the dividend payments will continue uninterrupted because the issuer's balance sheet is unaffected.
