Bitcoin’s numbers from March are hard to ignore and are bullish at first glance. Public and private companies collectively added 47,435 bitcoins to their treasuries last month — worth roughly $3.2 billion at month-end prices — but with one name removed from the ledger, the picture will change dramatically.
Almost every one of these coins was purchased by Michael Saylor strategy. Everyone, collectively, is in decline, according to a March report shared with bitcointreasuries.net Bitcoin Magazine.
This divergence has become the defining story of corporate Bitcoin adoption in 2026. The strategy bought 44,377 BTC in March alone, including one of the largest purchases ever in a single week — 22,337 BTC disclosed on March 16, funded by $1.57 billion in ATM sales from her company. STRC Preferred stock and common stock MSTR.
The company now controls two-thirds of all bitcoins held by public companies, and its holdings stand at about 762,000 bitcoins with a reasonable, if aggressive, path to one million.
Strategic STRC helps build an accumulation machine
To understand how the strategy continues to buy at this scale in what BitcoinTreasuries.net describes as a “bear market,” you need to understand You must understand STRC – The company’s variable rate perpetual preferred stock product.
STRC is targeting a price near $100 and is currently yielding approximately 11.5% annually, reset monthly. It sits above common shareholders in Strategy’s capital structure, offering more predictable returns than MSTR shares while still being tied to the Bitcoin treasury below them.
March was a watershed moment for the tool. STRC recorded its highest ever single-day trading volume on March 12 – $746 million – followed by its second highest on March 31, at $522 million. Weekly volumes reached $2.27 billion from March 9-13 alone. Not only has this demand set records; It financed the purchase of Bitcoin.
Strategy’s 8-K for the week of March 9-15 reported $1.2 billion in STRC ATM revenue and $396 million in MSTR revenue, which together funded a record purchase of 22,337 bitcoin.
Now Strategy has placed a new order worth $42 billion Automated teller machine softwaresplit equally between STRC and MSTR, plus an additional $2.1 billion in STRK. According to BitcoinTreasuries.net modeling, if returns reach an average of roughly $2.3 billion per month over 19 months — and Bitcoin hovers near $75,000 — the strategy could reach 1 million BTC by November 2026.
A more conservative forecast using Strategy’s average monthly buy price of 21,000 BTC since January 2025 pushes that date to March 2027.
Bitcoin leaderboard is in free fall
March also brought a major shake-up to the leaderboard that reflects how different the rules of the game are outside of Saylor’s orbit. MARA Holdings – which was the second largest public Bitcoin treasury – Sold 15,133 Bitcoin, worth approximately $1.1 billion, to buy back convertible securities. The sale wiped out approximately 28% of its previous holdings.
As Tyler Rowe of BitcoinTreasuries.net put it: “MARA borrowed aggressively to accumulate bonds during the bull run and is now selling Bitcoin at a loss to service that debt. This is the exact scenario that critics of debt-fueled treasury strategies have warned about.”
This opened the door for Twenty One Capital (XXI) by Jack Mallers It moves In second place, it currently holds 43,514 BTC – although it is worth noting that XXI has not purchased BTC since August. Its rise is merely a function of the MARA’s decline. Metaplanet, the Japanese company that has become one of the most aggressive Bitcoin aggregators outside the US, followed in early April by taking 5,075 BTC to reach 40,177 BTC, leapfrogging MARA to take third place.
The GameStop story is perhaps the most bizarre. The cryptocurrency-turned-Treasury pledged 4,709 BTC as collateral in a covered call strategy with Coinbase Credit, leaving just 1 BTC in direct holdings.
The counterparty retains the rights to sell or re-pledge the pledged Bitcoin, although GameStop retains the contractual right to redeem an equivalent amount. The move dropped the company from the 21st largest Bitcoin holder to approximately 190th on the leaderboard.
The accumulation of Bitcoin in the public company has stopped
Beyond the headline drama, the March report showed a quieter but more important trend: with the exception of strategy, corporate condemnation of Bitcoin is declining sharply. Other non-strategic public companies piled in aggressively last summer, but net buying has declined and direct sales have accelerated since October.
The number of monthly buyers has declined steadily since September, reaching just 16 in March.
Ryan Strauss of Bitcoin Advisory Group put it bluntly in the report: “What stands out to me is how structurally dependent the growth of key holdings is on strategy – once removed, the fundamental signal flips from strength to clear slowdown. The decline in both net accumulation and the number of participants suggests that this is not just noise, but rather a broad-based slowdown in corporate conviction following last summer’s aggressive posturing.”
Among the sellers: Exodus Movement, whose Bitcoin holdings fell by an estimated 1,084 BTC as it financed its acquisition of W3C Corp; Fold Inc., down 178 BTC; And Cango Inc., fell by 331.3 BTC after a mining update.
A new financial ecosystem is taking shape around STRC
What may be most important about March is not the buying or selling, but the emerging ecosystem of financial products being built around STRC itself. At least five entities have disclosed allocations to STRC or plan to acquire it. Strive, an asset manager, is led by CEO Matt Cole committed $50 million – more than a third of the company’s treasury – and described the STRC as “an alternative to US dollar reserves consisting primarily of cash in low-yield money market funds.”
DeFi protocol Apyx, which describes itself as the first stablecoin backed by dividends, owned approximately 450,000 shares of STRC stock worth $45 million as of early April, using the proceeds to support its stablecoin apxUSD.
Meanwhile, mutual funds and ETFs now have more than $2 billion in digital credit products in total, with STRC alone accounting for $591 million across datasets from Capital Group, BlackRock, Fidelity, VanEck, and others.
BitcoinTreasuries.net portrays this institutional path as particularly timely amid a particular credit crisis in which some issuers have restricted retail cash withdrawals or limited redemptions — a structurally opaque system that, the report says, compares unfavorably with bitcoin-backed digital credit where collateral is on-chain and pricing is publicly visible.
Overall, the broader conclusion from March 2026: corporate adoption of Bitcoin is not weakening, but concentrating. The strategy is not just the bigger player, but increasingly the market itself, with an expanding financial structure designed to continue accumulating no matter which way the price goes.
