The Michael Saylor-led financial intelligence firm Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, announced today that it had added 130 Bitcoin (BTC) to its holdings, spending $10.7 million at an average price of $82,981 per BTC between March 10 and 16, 2025. But the largest crypto by market cap’s price is down 0.6% in the last 24 hours. Has Saylor’s company lost its influence on the market? For now, yes.

As reported by Cryptopolitan, the purchase, funded through the sale of 123,000 shares of its 8.00% Series A perpetual preferred stock, barely registered on Bitcoin’s price chart, which ticked up to $83,800 in the early hours of Monday before slumping to $83,400, according to CoinGecko. 

Strategy’s recent acquisitions follow a 20,365 BTC haul on February 24, 2025, for nearly $2 billion.

Is this a glaring warning sign that co-founder and executive chairman Michael Saylor no longer has any “control” over Bitcoin’s price movements? The short answer is that the market is just in a slump, and the world has much more to worry about than what Strategy wants to do with Bitcoin.

Markets mature from institutional investment sentiments

On August 11, 2020, Strategy, then MicroStrategy, made its first-ever Bitcoin purchase public, snapping up 21,454 BTC for $250 million. Not many institutions were pro-crypto then, and anyone could argue their purchase was part of the reason why BTC ended that month 3.2% up.

Four years and about six months later, Strategy is now holding 499,226 BTC, valued at $41.6 billion, per Arkham Intelligence. This is over 2% of Bitcoin’s fixed 21 million supply, yet the company is unable to muster more than a yawn from the market.

There could be two reasons for this: The first one is that the crypto market has matured and is now flooded with institutional and retail investors. It’s been over a year since the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved Bitcoin exchange-traded funds. 

So, no single player, even one as “bullish” as Strategy, could sway the markets towards a price uptrend. It might take a collective effort from every institution involved with crypto to convince more people to drive demand up and the price even higher.

The second and last reason is that the US has a leader who wears crypto on his sleeve, and even that hasn’t stopped the several weeks of the market’s bloodbath. There’s only so much one firm can do compared to a government that is creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve. 

If Trump markets have wiped over $20,000 in BTC’s prices, can Strategy pull the value back up alone? No, all it can do is buy the dip, just like the rest of us.  

What if Saylor sells?

If Saylor’s buying sprees no longer move the needle, the real terror investors will have to think about what might happen if Strategy decides to sell its nearly half a million Bitcoin. A sudden liquidation, or even the rumor of one, could send Bitcoin’s price into a nosedive by triggering a cascade of panic selling. 

On Reddit’s UK Bitcoin community, several users are asking if Strategy’s BTC accumulation spree is best for crypto. Some questioned Saylor’s trustworthiness, citing his checkered past, including a $25 million tax fraud conviction and SEC charges for fraudulent financial reports. Others fret about Strategy’s debt-heavy balance sheet, worrying a market crash could force a sell-off. 

Satoshi Nakamoto intended to make BTC a decentralized dream to free finance from centralized control. A single corporate entity handling 2% of the total supply and publicly claiming they want to buy more, doesn’t really spell decentralization. 

To understand why investors are so jittery, let’s take a bite at Strategy’s financial playbook, or, as I see it, a bit of risk and recklessness. The company’s Bitcoin buying spree is sponsored by debt instruments, stock offerings, and now, high-interest preferred stock issuances, like the recent $10.7 million raise. It plans to issue $2 billion more to fund additional purchases. 

We all know business is about risk, and that’s exactly the type of financial engineering that keeps Strategy’s stock trading at a premium to its net asset value. 

However, this comes at a steep cost, creating a capital structure bloated with high-interest debt, a house of cards waiting to collapse if Bitcoin’s value tanks.

A prolonged market downturn could strain Strategy’s ability to service its debt, forcing it to either dilute shareholders further or, even worse, liquidate its Bitcoin holdings. Where will the crypto market stand if this happens? Two words, massive losses.

Saylor is headstrong about his bet that Bitcoin’s price will only rise, and as much as it could pay off in huge returns if it does (the company’s holdings are up 6.9% year-to-date), it seems a little bit more “emotional” than logical.

Buy the dip, not the whole industry

The crypto market now carries one sobering truth: no single entity, no matter how large or loud, can dictate its direction anymore. Strategy’s latest Bitcoin purchase could have been “breaking news at one point, but the influence is just not there anymore. 

We need our markets to remain decentralized, living up to Bitcoin’s original promise of freedom from centralized control and pumps and dumps, rather than being pushed up and down by corporate giants like Strategy.