Bitcoin's biggest corporate cheerleader logged one of the largest losses in its history on crypto's roughest day in years. Bitcoin slid 13% Thursday to about $63,600 by 4pm Eastern, its steepest 24-hour drop since mid-2022, the Wall Street Journal reports. Minutes later, MicroStrategy—now rebranded as "Strategy" and led by bitcoin champion Michael Saylor—reported a fourth-quarter net loss of $12.4 billion, driven largely by a $17.4 billion markdown on its massive digital-asset stash under fair-value accounting rules. Bitcoin has fallen almost 50% from its October 2025 peak and is now well below where it was when President Trump took office.
Saylor has spent six years turning his software firm into a bitcoin vault, issuing stock and debt to accumulate more than 713,000 tokens as of Feb. 1 at an average cost of $76,052, the Journal reports. With bitcoin now well below that level, Strategy's shares have sunk 68% over the past year, and investors are watching a key metric called mNAV—enterprise value divided by crypto holdings—hover around 1.1. Saylor had previously floated the idea of selling tokens or bitcoin-linked derivatives if that ratio dipped under 1, but on Thursday he posted "HODL" on X and reiterated his bullish stance on a conference call, praising Trump as a "bitcoin president" and predicting US leadership in digital assets.
The New York Times calls the downturn another "crypto winter," the worst crisis for the industry since the 2022 collapse of the FTX exchange. Analysts say it shows how crypto remains vulnerable to the same economic trends that have caused a recent sell-off of tech stocks. "A lot of times it has behaved basically like a tech stock,"John Todaro, a crypto analyst at Needham, says of bitcoin. "You have some market participants selling it—going, 'I don't want just another tech exposure.'" Strategy's stock fell 17.1% on Thursday but it gained 7.2% in after-hours trading. The price of bitcoin also rebounded somewhat—after falling as low as just over $60,000 late Thursday, it reached $66,000 Friday morning.
Analysts say Strategy faces no immediate liquidity crunch: the company mostly funded its buying spree through equity and unsecured convertible debt, with $8.2 billion maturing between 2028 and 2032 and more than $2 billion in cash on hand. CEO Phong Le said interest payments are manageable unless bitcoin crashes to around $8,000 and stays there for five years. Smaller copycat firms that followed Strategy into the "bitcoin-on-balance-sheet" play are in a weaker spot, many trading below the value of their token holdings and now exploring mergers to survive.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
