Michael Saylor‘s Strategy has overtaken BlackRock to become the world’s largest institutional Bitcoin holder. According to an April 20 SEC filing, the company acquired 34,164 BTC for $2.54 billion between April 13 and April 19 at an average price of $74,395 per coin. The purchase lifted total holdings to 815,061 BTC, worth roughly $61.5 billion at current spot prices.
That puts Strategy ahead of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), which held 802,823 BTC at its last disclosure. This is the first time in the spot ETF era that a single corporate treasury has surpassed the world’s largest Bitcoin fund, and it reverses a lead IBIT has held since Q2 2024.
The Gap Closed in Just Four Months
In early February, IBIT was still ahead of Strategy by nearly 60,000 BTC. The reversal came from a single number: Strategy added roughly 80,000 BTC in the first four months of 2026, a pace that no Bitcoin ETF has matched. IBIT pulled in about $8.4 billion in Q1 net inflows, translating to roughly 23,000 BTC added. Strategy bought more than three times that.
The engine behind that accumulation was STRC, a perpetual preferred stock Strategy issued in late 2025. The April 13-19 purchase was funded with a mix of $2.176 billion in STRC preferred and $366 million in MSTR Class A common. Roughly 86% of the financing came from preferred issuance, meaning MSTR common stock absorbed almost no dilution. STRC printed a record $1.156 billion in daily volume on April 13.
The New Bitcoin Ownership Hierarchy
The top-three picture now looks different than it has at any point in the ETF era.
| Holder | BTC Holdings | Approx. Value | % of BTC Supply |
|---|---|---|---|
| Satoshi Nakamoto (inactive) | ~1,100,000 | ~$83 billion | ~5.24% |
| Strategy (MSTR) | 815,061 | $61.5 billion | 3.88% |
| BlackRock iShares Bitcoin Trust | 802,823 | $60.6 billion | 3.82% |
Only Satoshi Nakamoto is estimated to hold more, and those coins have sat untouched since the earliest days of the network. In practical terms, Strategy is now the single largest active holder of Bitcoin on Earth. The company’s stack represents 3.88% of Bitcoin’s total supply.
Two Completely Different Bets
The comparison between Strategy and IBIT matters because the two vehicles represent different forms of Bitcoin exposure. BlackRock holds Bitcoin on behalf of retail and institutional investors through a regulated fund structure, and its holdings grow or shrink based on daily inflows and outflows. Strategy is a publicly traded operating company that has turned itself into a leveraged Bitcoin treasury, using debt and equity markets to expand reserves regardless of retail sentiment.
That difference shows up clearly in the BTC yield metric Strategy reports. The company posted 9.5% YTD 2026, meaning each MSTR share today controls 9.5% more Bitcoin than it did on January 1. That figure compounds to roughly 37% annualized, and it is only possible because capital raised through STRC is deployed into BTC faster than shares are issued.
Saylor framed the purchase in familiar terms on X, posting a screenshot of Strategy’s Bitcoin portfolio tracker with the phrase Think Even Bigger the day before the filing dropped. Traders now treat that pattern as an early marker for another weekly treasury announcement.
Symbolic Weight, Real Concentration Risk
The 12,000 BTC margin between Strategy and IBIT is small in absolute terms. Daily IBIT inflows could reverse the order at any point. What the moment captures is a shift in how institutional Bitcoin exposure is built. IBIT pulls Bitcoin in through a passive, fee-based structure that reached $70 billion in assets faster than any ETF in history. Strategy pulls Bitcoin in through active capital markets engineering that has no direct equivalent in the fund world.
The concentration question is real. A single corporate treasury now controls nearly 4% of all Bitcoin that will ever exist, and its buying pace is tied to the performance of a preferred stock product rather than to organic Bitcoin demand. Strategy’s own investor materials confirm the company would begin selling Bitcoin if its market cap ever fell below the value of its Bitcoin holdings, a trigger that would flip the largest active buyer into a forced seller.
For BlackRock, being overtaken is a symbolic hit for a fund that defined the institutional Bitcoin story over the past two years. For Strategy, it is validation of a playbook that critics called reckless and that has now produced the largest active Bitcoin position on the planet.
