Strive Sold No SATA Preferred for Five Weeks and Still Paid the 13% Daily Dividend

Strive paid a cash dividend to its preferred shareholders on every business day in July. It sold none of that preferred stock during the same stretch. The 10-Q the company filed on August 10 puts both facts on the same page, and the second one is the interesting half.

What SATA is

SATA is Strive's Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Preferred Stock, listed on Nasdaq under that ticker, with a stated amount of $100 a share. On June 16, 2026 it became the first listed security in the history of US capital markets to pay a cash dividend every single business day. For the period running August 3 to August 31, the payment is $0.0516 per share per business day, an annualized rate of 13.00%. As of August 7 the company had paid 44 consecutive daily dividends.

Strive itself is a bitcoin treasury company. As of August 7 it held 20,167 bitcoin, $154.9 million in cash and cash equivalents, and 505,000 shares of Strategy's STRC preferred carried at $48.0 million. Its operating businesses — investment advisory and a small medical device line — produced total revenue of $2.94 million in the quarter ended June 30.

The engine that pays the dividend

A preferred like SATA is designed to fund itself. Strive sells new SATA shares near $100 through an at-the-market program run by Cantor Fitzgerald, Barclays and a syndicate of seven other agents. That cash buys bitcoin and covers the dividend on shares already outstanding. In the second quarter the program ran hard: 3.5 million new SATA shares sold for $356.7 million of gross proceeds. The count went from 2,012,729 shares at the end of 2025 to 7,829,502 by August 7, taking the liquidation preference from $201.3 million to $783.0 million in about seven months.

Then comes the line in the notes to the financial statements: from July 1, 2026 to August 7, 2026, Strive issued no shares of SATA stock under the sales agreement. That is five weeks of nothing, and it was not a capacity problem. The program is authorized for $2.6 billion and roughly $2.24 billion of it remains unused.

Price was the constraint. SATA closed at $98.67 on August 10 and changed hands near $96.60 in late July. Selling a $100 claim for $96.60 raises less cash than the obligation it creates, so the sensible move is to stop selling — which also switches off the mechanism that pays the existing holders.

Where the money came from instead

The August 10 8-K discloses share counts a week apart. Class A common went from 74,417,438 on July 31 to 75,647,438 on August 7, an increase of 1,230,000 shares. ASST closed at $12.44 on August 10, which puts that week's common issuance somewhere near $15 million.

Here is what happened in the same seven days. Strive bought 147 bitcoin at an average of about $64,812, roughly $9.5 million. Cash rose by $3.6 million, from $151.3 million to $154.9 million. And the daily dividend on 7,829,502 shares at $0.0516 comes to about $404,000 a business day, or a little over $2 million across the week.

Week of August 3–7, 2026	Approx. amount
Class A common shares issued (1,230,000 at $12.44)	+$15.3M
SATA preferred shares issued	$0
Bitcoin purchased (147 BTC at $64,812)	-$9.5M
SATA dividends paid (5 business days)	-$2.0M
Change in cash reported	+$3.6M

Strive does not label which dollars went where, and no filing claims a direct link. The arithmetic is still worth laying out, because it comes close to balancing. Common shareholders were diluted by about 1.5% in a week at a company whose preferred stock program had gone dormant.

The rate is a dial, not a promise

The dividend is payable when, as and if declared by the board, and Strive can adjust the rate every month at its sole discretion. Its stated intention, written into the certificate of designation, is to set the rate at whatever keeps SATA trading between $99 and $101.

The document limits cuts more than it limits raises. A reduction is capped at 25 basis points in any single period, plus an adjustment for movement in one-month term SOFR. The rate can never be set below one-month term SOFR. And no cut is permitted at all before the trailing 20-day average price reaches $99. A dividend left unpaid accumulates and compounds monthly at a separate compounded rate.

Read together, those terms point one direction. A price below par blocks a rate cut and pushes toward a rate increase to pull the price back up, which raises the annual bill at exactly the moment the funding program has stalled. The daily payment schedule is the term every headline led with, and it is the least informative one in the document. Monthly resets and board discretion are what a holder actually owns.

What it costs to keep running

At 13% on $783.0 million, the SATA dividend runs about $101.8 million a year. Set that against $2.94 million of quarterly revenue. In the second quarter alone, declared preferred dividends of $26.2 million came to roughly nine times everything the operating business brought in.

The reserve set aside for this is $154.9 million of cash plus the $48.0 million STRC position, about $203 million. With no fresh issuance and no bitcoin sales, that covers just under two years of payments. Chief executive Matthew Cole framed the balance sheet in the earnings release as debt-free, with zero margin requirements and zero encumbered bitcoin, built to hold up through bitcoin volatility. On debt, he is right — Strive retired all of it.

Preferred stock sits in its own category. It carries no maturity date and no covenants, which is precisely why a board can keep paying through a $257.6 million quarterly loss without tripping anything. It also ranks ahead of common stock in a liquidation, and at $783.0 million that claim is now larger than the $646.2 million of common stockholders' equity Strive reported at June 30. Anyone holding ASST for exposure to 20,167 bitcoin is standing behind that line.

What to watch next

Strive files an 8-K most Mondays with updated holdings and share counts, which makes this unusually easy to track without specialist tools.

• The SATA share count. Any increase means the preferred program restarted, which needs the price back near $100.
• SATA's price against $100. It is the switch that controls everything else.
• The monthly rate notice. A move above 13% is a signal about demand, not generosity.
• The Class A common count. Continued growth with a dormant preferred program tells you who is funding the dividend.

The full filings are worth ten minutes for anyone holding either security: the Q2 2026 Form 10-Q carries the SATA terms and issuance figures, and the Q2 earnings release has the balance sheet and the bitcoin yield numbers.

The number that matters is the share count

A 13% yield paid daily reads like a product feature. What it describes is a company selling securities to pay other securities and buying bitcoin with the difference, a loop that works for as long as somebody keeps buying near par. For five weeks in July and early August, nobody did, and the loop stayed open because common shareholders absorbed the gap.

That is a survivable position with $203 million in reserve, no debt and a bitcoin price near $65,000. It is a different position if bitcoin spends a year lower and SATA spends that year under $99. The cadence of the payments has no bearing on which of those happens. The share counts in the next few Monday filings do.

All figures come from Strive's Form 10-Q and Current Reports on Form 8-K filed with the SEC on August 10, 2026, and from closing prices on August 10. Nothing here is investment advice.