Strategy purchased about 89,599 Bitcoin in the first quarter of 2026, its second-largest quarterly accumulation on record, doing so while Bitcoin traded in a downtrend and sentiment across the crypto market was pessimistic.
According to crypto expert Adam Livingston, the market still is not fully valuing what that pace of accumulation could mean over time.
Q1 2026 Changed How The Market Reads Weakness
According to numbers from its Bitcoin purchases page, Strategy bought a total of 89,599 BTC in the first quarter of 2026, taking its total holdings to 762,099 BTC. This was the second-largest accumulation range period, and only the fourth quarter of 2024 was larger.
According to Livingston, if Strategy were to sustain Q1’s acquisition pace for three consecutive years, its holdings would reach 1.84 million Bitcoin by April 2029, equivalent to roughly 2.4 times its current holdings of 762,099 BTC. That projection, he notes, assumes no improvement in capital market conditions and no expansion in demand for STRC, Strategy’s variable-rate perpetual preferred stock. It is, in other words, a floor estimate built on the worst-case scenario.
The chart that accompanied Livingston’s post shows Strategy bought 340,983 BTC in regimes above $90,000, compared with 161,326 BTC in sub-$50,000 regimes, a high-to-low accumulation ratio of 2.11x.
The largest single band on the chart is the $90,000 to $110,000 range, where disclosed purchases totaled 297,102 BTC across 30 events, accounting for 39.0% of all buys. The $70,000 to $90,000 band comes next with 162,805 BTC, then the sub-$30,000 band with 99,030 BTC.
These buying bands show something important: Strategy has not been most extreme in its buys when Bitcoin looked cheap. It has been at its most extreme when Bitcoin was already expensive and still rising.
Bitcoin Itself Is Still Undervalued
Livingston ties the Q1 accumulation story to a much larger Bitcoin thesis and how it relates to Strategy’s accumulations. Even if Strategy were to trade at a flat 1.0 multiple to net asset value, generating zero BTC yield premium, Livingston calculates the company’s 1x mNAV price at $288 per share by that point. The actual outcome, however, will be considerably higher because the model assumes a static Bitcoin price.
If Bitcoin simply reverts to its long-term power law trend, which places the leading cryptocurrency’s price at a target range near $360,000 by the end of 2028, then the entire crypto industry is badly underestimating both Strategy’s future balance sheet and the knock-on effect on Bitcoin’s own valuation.
A company that can accumulate nearly 90,000 BTC in a single difficult quarter and that is incentivized to buy harder as prices rise is a huge demand force. If such large-scale corporate accumulation continues even in weak quarters and even increases when prices recover, then the supply available to the broader market may keep reducing at a faster pace than many traders are modeling.
Featured image from Pixabay, chart from Tradingview.com
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