Up To Par: Why $STRC Is Working Exactly as Designed

January 21, 2026 | True North Recap
Up To Par | True North Podcast | Ep. 52

Wednesday night. 10pm ET. The True North crew assembled with Dan Hillery, Mike (Grain of Salt), and Soleil (NithuSezni) and proceeded to spend an hour making one thing crystal clear:

If you’re sleeping on $STRC, this episode is your alarm clock.

$STRC isn’t just another preferred stock. It might be the most important financial product to emerge in years, and many people still have no idea it exists. One of the things I appreciate about the True North crew is how they make the complex feel approachable.

Wednesday Night Highlights

$STRC is doing exactly what it was designed to do, and that’s kind of a big deal. Bitcoin dropped 33% from its peak. Many stocks got hammered. Meanwhile, $STRC is chilling like nothing happened.

Yes, there was a volatility spike when things got ugly, but Dan pulled up the chart and made an important observation: zoom out five, six, seven years of Strategy paying that monthly dividend, and this early turbulence barely registers. The chart flattens into nothing.

Grain referenced how Saylor called this product “the iPhone moment,” and after watching it hold its peg through the chaos, I’m starting to think he undersold it.

$300 million in $STRC deployed this past week. Let that marinate longer than the chicken in your refrigerator. Grain ran the numbers, and at a conservative $250 million per week, that’s $12 billion a year flowing into Bitcoin through one instrument. If it ramps to $500 million weekly, that’s $25 billion. These aren’t fantasy numbers anymore. This is Monday’s 8-K.

The three fuel tanks are fully operational. Remember Strategy’s rocket ship graphic from December 1st? Grain connected the dots tonight from his recent article:

Tank one: Bitcoin (the base of everything)
Tank two: the preferreds, with $STRC leading the pack because of its floating rate and price peg
Tank three: $2.25 billion in cash

Three levers to keep accumulating Bitcoin whether we’re at $80K or $150K. Grain remarked that this is a fundamentally different company than it was even six months ago.

On the macro front: The True North crew didn’t sugarcoat it. The U.S. is running a $1.9 trillion deficit annually, and there’s no political appetite to cut spending or raise taxes. Grain pulled up the Fed’s own graphics and pointed out they conveniently left the deficit off their little pie chart. Classic.

They also touched on Japan, where rates are rising from zero for the first time in decades. The U.S. is likely headed in the opposite direction with a new Fed chair coming in May. Grain’s point: if U.S. rates drop, the spread between those rates and $STRC’s 11% yield gets even wider.

The takeaway: real interest rates won’t outpace debasement. Your money market account is a slow bleed. Meanwhile, $STRC offers an 11% yield backed by Bitcoin. This starts looking like the only rational response.

Zoom Out

$STRC is the first preferred equity in the history of financial markets to have an ATM shelf registration.

That might sound like jargon, but what it means is that Strategy can sell more $STRC shares whenever the price creeps above $100, which is how they keep it stable. No one had done this before. Ever.

Dan put it plainly: “an equitized stable coin backed by Strategy’s Bitcoin in the equities market.”

And then there’s Dan’s spreadsheet.

Around the 57:00 mark of the show, he pulled up his bull case model for Strategy’s Bitcoin accumulation. He acknowledged multiple independent variables, but used a conservative price assumption (Bitcoin trading between $110K and $150K). The result: Strategy holding between 1 million and 1.2 million Bitcoin by the end of 2026.

Now pair that with something Saylor said in a recent interview:

When Strategy reaches 5% of the network, he projects Bitcoin at $1 million per coin.
At 7%, he’s looking at $10 million.
He also said he expects their accumulation to “exponentially slow down” somewhere in that 5–7% range.

I did the math, and 5% of Bitcoin’s 21 million supply is roughly 1.05 million coins. Dan’s model has Strategy potentially crossing that threshold this year.

This isn’t modeling for fun. Saylor has a target. He has a plan. And if Dan’s projections hold, we might be watching Strategy approach that 5% mark in real time.

The Show Quotables

Grain, on why he’s not betting on the old guard:
“What do I think about Bitcoin in a Netflix world? I don’t want to be a Blockbuster. That’s the difference between gold and Bitcoin. Bitcoin is Netflix.”

Dan, on the long game:
“These are perpetual preferred products, keyword being perpetual, and Bitcoin’s a perpetual digital store of value.”

Soleil, keeping us honest:
“There are two kinds of short-term price predictions with Bitcoin. There are those who don’t know what the price will do. And there are people who don’t know that they don’t know.”

My Two Sats

What gets me excited is what $STRC working actually means: more Bitcoin on Strategy’s balance sheet. More Bitcoin getting scooped up. And that’s my signal to keep stacking for my own treasury (my family).

Right now, each dollar exchanges for a little more than 1,000 satoshis. When Bitcoin hits $500K, that same dollar exchanges for 200 satoshis. There’s enough Bitcoin for everyone, but I’d rather be early than wishing later I’d paid attention. I bet Michael Saylor agrees.

Grain’s model has Strategy hitting 840,000 Bitcoin by year end. Conservative, he says. Dan’s model is north of a million, assuming $500 million weekly in common equity issuance and continued $STRC demand. They’re working with different assumptions, but the direction is the same: up and to the right.

February 5th is circled on my calendar. That’s when Strategy drops 2026 guidance, and the True North crew anticipates fireworks with bigger ATMs across the board.

If $STRC keeps this pace, we might be watching the early innings of something historic that reshapes how people think about yield, risk, and what it means to save money in a world that won’t stop printing it.

And speaking of being there for history: the True North Inside event at Strategy World is nearly sold out. No livestream. No recordings. Just real conversations.

Bringing you lil’ Bits of Clarity, one Wednesday at a time.

Colleen | The Bitcoin Gal