Double Build-Up: Smart Money Piles Into Bitcoin & USD Reserves Simultaneously

Institutional players aren't picking sides—they're buying both.

A sophisticated capital preservation strategy is gaining traction, one that sidesteps the traditional 'either-or' debate by aggressively accumulating Bitcoin alongside US dollar reserves. This dual-pronged approach treats digital gold and fiat not as rivals, but as complementary hedges in a single, defensive playbook.

The Core Tension: Hedge Against Everything

The logic is brutally simple. USD reserves act as a buffer against crypto volatility and provide dry powder for deployment. The Bitcoin allocation, meanwhile, serves as a direct hedge against monetary debasement and systemic risk in the traditional financial system—a system currently paying you handsomely in fiat to watch its purchasing power erode, the ultimate finance irony.

Execution Over Ideology

This isn't a philosophical bet on a crypto-native future. It's a tactical, balance-sheet maneuver. Funds build dollar positions through treasury bills or money markets, capturing yield. Simultaneously, they execute dollar-cost averaging into Bitcoin, treating it as a non-correlated, high-conviction strategic asset. The goal isn't to time the market's peak; it's to ensure exposure no matter which narrative—inflation or deflation—wins the next round.

The strategy reveals a cold truth: the smartest capital doesn't believe in grand narratives. It believes in optionality. While pundits argue dogma, portfolios are being built for both collapse and renaissance. In the end, the only loser is the investor waiting for a clear signal.

Strategy Has Increased Both Its Bitcoin & USD Treasuries

As revealed in an X post by co-founder and chairman Michael Saylor, Strategy has added 1,287 BTC to its bitcoin treasury. In total, this acquisition cost the company $116.3 million, according to the filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Strategy didn’t buy all of this stack in 2026; it purchased 3 BTC between December 29th and 31st, and 1,283 BTC between January 1st and 4th. After these additions, the firm’s Bitcoin reserves have grown to 673,783 tokens.

The BTC acquisition isn’t all that Saylor has announced. At the start of last month, the company started a new USD reserve as a way of making sure that dividend payments occur in time regardless of short-term volatility in the market. It has just made another expansion to this reserve.

Initially, the firm allocated $1.44 billion to the USD reserve, with a $748 million addition coming a couple of weeks ago. Now, it has raised it further by $62 million, taking the total to $2.25 billion. Strategy has funded this expansion and the latest BTC purchase using sales of its MSTR at-the-market (ATM) stock offering.

Strategy is currently by far the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin in the world, as the below table from BitcoinTreasuries.net shows.

The company’s 673,783 BTC stack is today worth $63.48 billion, more than 25% above its cost basis of $50.55 billion. Though, while Strategy has done well overall, 2025 wasn’t such a bright year for it.

The SEC filing states that the treasury firm closed December 31st with an unrealized loss of $5.40 billion on its digital asset holdings. The figure for the fourth quarter alone is even worse: an unrealized loss of $17.44 billion.

The bad 2025 is naturally a result of the bearish price action that Bitcoin and the wider digital asset sector faced between October and November. Nonetheless, Strategy still hasn’t sold any coins and its recent purchases suggest it’s committed to growing the treasury further for now.

In some other news, the Bitcoin spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) saw the highest amount of net inflows since October last week.

Spot ETFs are financial instruments that allow investors to gain indirect exposure to BTC’s price movements. That is, they allow traders a route into the cryptocurrency that’s off-chain. Some traditional investors and institutional entities prefer to invest into the asset this way.

Much like the spot on-chain demand, spot ETFs have also faced weak netflows since October, but last week diverged from the recent trend with net inflows of $458.77 million.

BTC Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is floating around $94,200, up 8% over the last seven days.