Strive Tops Marathon Holdings With 36,818 BTC After $335M Weekly Purchases
Strive Asset Management closed the week of October 19 with 36,818 BTC on its balance sheet, surpassing Marathon Holdings to become one of the largest corporate Bitcoin holders in the market after accumulating 4,045 BTC across two purchases totaling roughly $335 million.
Strive Asset Management closed the week of October 19 with 36,818 BTC on its balance sheet, surpassing Marathon Holdings to become one of the largest corporate Bitcoin holders in the market after accumulating 4,045 BTC across two purchases totaling roughly $335 million.
The final tranche, announced Monday, covered 1,223 BTC at an average price of $81,734 per coin, or approximately $100 million. An earlier purchase that week added 2,822 BTC. Strive is funding the buying program through equity financing, including a new 15% preferred stock offering, and is preparing to receive proceeds from a $700 million SATS offering with settlement scheduled for Tuesday, October 21.
Marathon Holdings (MARA) had held approximately 36,000 BTC before Strive's latest disclosures pushed the newer entrant past that threshold. The crossing matters symbolically: MARA has long been cited alongside MicroStrategy as one of the defining corporate Bitcoin holders in the public markets. Strive's arrival above that watermark signals that the field of publicly traded companies building Bitcoin treasuries at scale is no longer limited to a handful of pioneers.
The corporate treasury playbook Strive is running traces directly back to MicroStrategy's initial Bitcoin purchases in August 2020. What started as a single software company's hedge against dollar debasement has since attracted miners, asset managers, and diversified holding companies. Strive's approach differs from MicroStrategy's early debt-financed model: the company is using preferred equity rather than convertible notes, which avoids the interest obligations that can compound balance sheet stress during prolonged price drawdowns.
The risks embedded in this strategy are substantial. At $81,734 per coin, Strive's 36,818 BTC position carries a market value north of $3 billion. A 20% correction in Bitcoin would erase more than $600 million in paper value and could pressure the company to defend its preferred stock obligations. Equity dilution is also a live concern: each new share issuance to fund BTC purchases reduces existing shareholders' proportional ownership, a trade-off that only pays off if Bitcoin appreciates faster than the dilution compounds. Regulatory treatment of corporate Bitcoin holdings, including tax rules around unrealized gains and potential SEC scrutiny of treasury-focused securities offerings, adds another layer of uncertainty.
With Strive's $700 million SATS settlement arriving this week, the company could add further to its position before the month closes. Each incremental purchase at current price levels raises the average cost basis across the corporate holder cohort, tightening the margin between acquisition prices and the levels at which balance sheets would start showing stress. Strive's climb past Marathon Holdings is a data point in an accelerating institutional land grab, one where the scoreboard is measured in satoshis and the financing structures are growing more complex by the quarter.
