Michael Saylor, founder and executive chairman of Strategy, took the Nakamoto Stage at Bitcoin 2026 on Tuesday to argue that a nine-month-old preferred stock instrument has become the fastest-growing credit product in the world — and that its expansion is only getting started.
The keynote, framed around what Saylor calls digital credit, was a structured pitch for STRC, Strategy’s Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock, which trades on Nasdaq near its $100 par value and pays an 11.5% annualized monthly dividend.
He opened with a premise that set the tone for everything that followed: “The world is built on capital. The world runs on credit.”
For Saylor, Bitcoin is the capital layer. It is what he calls “ideal capital” — engineered, digital, portable, and historically superior to alternatives. He cited Bitcoin’s roughly 38% annualized return over the past five years against gold, the S&P 500, and real estate, which he described without hesitation as “awful.”
STRC, in his framework, is the credit layer built on top: it strips Bitcoin’s volatility from the equation, routes the excess return to common equity holders, and delivers what he described as a “comfortable ride” to investors who want cash flows rather than price exposure.
The contrast he drew between digital credit and traditional private credit was one of the sharper arguments in the talk. Private credit, he said, is illiquid, opaque, discrete, and burdened with fees — structured primarily around what issuers want. Digital credit, by his definition, is liquid, transparent, homogeneous, scalable, accessible, and carries no fee.
“We designed a digital instrument that is good for the investor,” he said, framing STRC as a structural correction to the incentive problem embedded in private markets.
He placed this in historical context, arguing that preferred capital had a parallel in 19th-century American railroads, where it comprised 20 to 30% of institutional financing before fading from use. Saylor said Strategy has reintroduced the model in the 21st century, built on Bitcoin rather than railroad track.
STRC’s $8.5 Billion dominance
The numbers he presented at the Nakamoto Stage were the center of gravity for the talk. STRC reached about $8.5 billion in notional value in nine months, a figure that on its own would make it larger than the entire existing universe of monthly-paying preferred securities combined.
He put annual growth for the program at around 350%, said April inflows alone, when annualized, point toward $38 billion a year, and described the product as sitting in “hypergrowth” with no clear end in sight. Liquidity, he said, has grown by a factor of eight in five months.
“This is going viral,” he told the audience.
Saylor: STRC is accessible
Part of what drives that velocity, in Saylor’s telling, is accessibility. STRC trades on Nasdaq and is available to any retail investor, while most comparable structured credit products are either locked up in private funds or restricted to institutional buyers.
He said roughly 80% of STRC holders are retail, but that corporate treasuries and institutions are beginning to follow. Strategy’s own data shows STRC has financed the acquisition of approximately 77,000 BTC in 2026 year-to-date, ten times the net inflow of all U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs combined during the same period.
The tax structure was another selling point. STRC dividends receive return-of-capital treatment, which means investors can reinvest cash flows without paying ordinary income tax on the full distribution, letting returns compound over time.
Saylor closed with a vision that was bigger than any single product. He said there is “a great thirst in the crypto economy to generate Bitcoin-backed yield” and that the opportunity is for 1,000 companies to build their own digital monetary and yield instruments on top of the same framework.
“Every dollar that flows into digital credit will flow into digital capital,” he said. “It will flow into the Bitcoin network. As it flows into the Bitcoin network, the price will increase.”
“We expect digital credit to drive the size of the bitcoin network… drive bitcoin to 10M a coin, make bitcoin a 2T dollar network til it grows higher, and give people an alternative to 20th century credit instruments” Saylor said.
He described the movement as “a massively powerful, multi-generational wealth transfer” and said his ultimate goal is for Strategy’s model to “power hundreds of millions of households with a high-yield savings account.”
