Q&A: Strive Paid More Than Half a Billion Dollars to Buy Nearly 6,200 Bitcoin Last Week. The Firm's CEO Explains Its Largest-Ever Purchase
By Joseph WilkinsAsset manager Strive bought 6,182 bitcoin last week, marking what its chief executive said was the Nasdaq-listed entity's largest weekly purchase.Strive--co-founded by biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy--is a bitcoin-treasury company, meaning it sells shares and debt to buy up bitcoin. The strategy surged in popularity last year, fueling in part a bitcoin rally that saw the flagship cryptocurrency hit a record high of more than $126,000 in October 2025.Matt Cole, Strive's chief executive officer, said the company continued buying bitcoin throughout 2026 despite the digital currency losing around 50% of its value since hitting a peak. Bitcoin recovered somewhat from the crash earlier this year to trade above $80,000 in recent weeks.Strive acquired last week's bitcoin tranche at an average price of $82,732, paying over $511 million by using the proceeds from a recent $630 million share sale. It now holds 43,000 Bitcoin in total, worth over $3.5 billion at last week's closing level.In an interview, Cole explained how Strive made it through crypto's bear market and why bitcoin is only going to get more volatile.The following has been edited for length and clarity.How did the firm get through the most recent crypto winter?In a bear market we expanded our balance sheet drastically, and the way we were able to expand was by issuing a lot of preferred equity shares, which are our products. That can be confusing to people that look at preferred equity as just a security, but we are providing a real solution to people that are income starved. In a bitcoin bear market, we have not generated profits as a whole, although this last quarter is looking really strong because we've bought a lot of bitcoin and bitcoin's up. But you wouldn't expect a company like ours to make a profit in a crypto bear market.What about the wider sector?The average player in the bitcoin space during this bear market has not been able to expand their balance sheet. A lot of them have been forced to sell. And you had a few treasury companies that didn't have long-term conviction and viewed it more as a get-rich-quick scheme.We were able to expand because people wanted the income from our products and no one else was able to offer those because they had already encumbered their bitcoin in other directions, and so we were able to purchase a lot at depressed prices. We bought a lot last year right when we went public, but it's really drawing down our average purchase price to well below $100,000. I think it's below $90,000 right now. So any real increase in price from here, our entire bitcoin holdings would be in profit.What is driving the investment case for bitcoin?The dollar debasement problem is compounding, not going away. In any fiat currency debt crisis, it doesn't tend to go linear, it tends to go exponential because the debt compounds on itself.I don't buy into the idea that bitcoin will have lower volatility and lower returns into the future, because I think the fiscal situation is getting worse. We're of the belief that future returns could actually accelerate over what they've done in the last five-to-ten years. I think it'll go up, but less so from the value of bitcoin's increase because it's the other side-the value of the dollar-that's going to decrease and debase.What does 15% yield look like when bitcoin doesn't produce an income?A lot of startups are not profitable but they're able to find a vast amount of customers and grow the size of their business drastically, with the view that they'll be able to generate substantial profits through what they're building. There's also a lot of demand for high income, because income investing, in our view, is broken. And our hope is that the high income from preferred shares actually can increase investors' purchasing power, and then it's a win-win where the common equity gets amplified bitcoin exposure and the preferred equity investor gets a better source of income than what's available in traditional fixed income.Write to Joseph Wilkins at [email protected]