- A bitcoin preferred stock dividend is paid from the issuing company's cash, because bitcoin produces no income; Strive's SATS accrues 15% a year on a $100 stated amount, payable every business day from 9 November 2026 if the board declares it.
- SATS priced at $90 on 15 October 2026, so the 15% is 16.7% on the price paid, and Strive intends to hold $22.50 a share, a quarter of that price, as an 18-month reserve in one pool it shares with its senior SATA preferred, which must be paid in full first.
- After month 18 the prospectus expects to fund SATS dividends mainly by raising new capital, such as at-the-market share sales, so the payment rests on continued demand for Strive's securities rather than on anything the bitcoin earns.
A bitcoin preferred stock dividend can't be paid from anything the bitcoin earns, because a coin earns its holder nothing. The money comes from somewhere else, and the documents behind Strive's new SATS say exactly where. On 15 October Strive, a Nasdaq-listed bitcoin treasury company, priced seven million shares of a perpetual preferred stock at $90 each. Each accrues 15% a year on a $100 stated amount. Strive pays the dividend in slices every business day from 9 November, if the board declares them. For the first eighteen months, the slices are meant to come from a reserve of $22.50 a share. It equals a quarter of each buyer's price.
You probably met SATS as a rate: 15%, paid daily. A rate can't tell you who is paying it, but the filings can: the reserve covers the first eighteen months, and after that the money mainly comes from selling more of Strive's securities. Behind both sits a balance sheet that is mostly bitcoin. (SATS is the ticker Strive has applied for, not a count of satoshis.)
If you paid $90, the first eighteen months of dividends give you back a quarter of it.
Vera valued companies for twenty years by the cash they send back to their owners. A payment interests her less than its source. She has the pricing term sheet and the prospectus open in front of her. You have the same pages and a calculator. Together you will follow one SATS dividend from the day it lands in a brokerage account back to where it starts.
"You paid ninety, and every sum on this page is done on a hundred," Vera says. The price gets her attention before the rate does. Your return starts in that ten-dollar gap.
What is a bitcoin preferred stock dividend?
You want to know what the ninety buys before you ask what it earns. The answer starts with where the share stands in line. Preferred stock sits between a company's debts and its common stock. It is paid after the debts and before ordinary shareholders, both while the business runs and if it is ever wound up. SATS is perpetual. It has no maturity date, so there is no day on which the $100 comes back.
It is cumulative, too. A skipped dividend keeps accruing. While one is owed, Strive can't pay dividends on its common stock or buy that stock back, with narrow exceptions. "Cumulative means a missed payment is remembered, not that it arrives," Vera says. On SATS the memory doesn't even earn interest, because unpaid dividends accrue nothing while they wait.
That old instrument has become the funding line of bitcoin treasury companies, the listed firms that hold bitcoin as their main asset. Strategy, the largest, has several preferreds outstanding. Strive's first, SATA, pays a variable rate and has paid it every business day since June. SATS is the second, at a fixed rate, standing behind SATA. Underneath, each works the same way. The company sells the preferred, buys bitcoin with much of the money and owes cash on a schedule.
"People call that bitcoin yield, which is generous to the word," Vera says. The coin pays nothing. A bitcoin preferred stock dividend is company cash paid on a share whose proceeds bought bitcoin, so the questions are which cash, from where, and until when.
What $90 buys on a $100 share
You do the first sum yourself, because it is short. Fifteen percent of $100 is $15 a year, and on the $90 you paid, that is 16.7%. Strive pays it as $1.25 a month, split across the month's business days. That comes to about six cents a share each business day. Your first payment will be larger, because it covers everything accrued since the deal closes.
"Ten dollars off isn't a gift. It's the market's price for everything the rate leaves out," Vera says. The deal launched at five million shares and priced seven million at $90. The extra demand went into size. A book-built offering tends to spend it that way, rather than on a higher price. Strive's first preferred also came to market below its stated amount: SATA priced at $80 last November.
The discount shows up twice more in the terms. Seven million shares at $100 make $700 million, and that is the amount Strive owes dividends on. It took in about $630 million in cash, before the banks' fees. If Strive is ever wound up, a holder's claim, the liquidation preference, can't be set below the stated amount. That holds whatever anyone paid.
None of that tells you how to get out, and the terms are sparing there. SATS has no market until Nasdaq approves the listing. Strive expects that within a month of settlement. You can't make Strive buy the shares back except after a "fundamental change", such as a takeover. Strive can redeem them only after a tax event, or once fewer than a quarter remain. Otherwise your exit is another buyer, at whatever that buyer pays.
Where the first eighteen months of dividends come from
Six cents a share has to sit in an account before it can reach yours. The term sheet names the account. At closing, Strive says, "we intend to increase our existing dividend reserve" by $22.50 a share, or eighteen months of dividends. Across seven million shares that comes to $157.5 million (computed). It goes into short-term investment-grade securities and money-market funds. Any interest it earns goes to Strive, which may spend it on more bitcoin.
Which money fills the reserve depends on the document you read. The term sheet funds the deposit from "existing cash on hand and securities held by us", while Strive's investor deck, drawn up for an illustrative $500 million raise, split it more plainly. Its slide reads "$112.5M held as an 18-month dividend reserve", with the rest buying bitcoin. Cash carries no label naming the deal it came from. On the final terms, the reserve is exactly a quarter of what buyers paid.
"At least that money has my name on it," you say.
"It has Strive's," Vera says. She turns the prospectus so you can read the line. The reserve is the "existing dividend reserve", enlarged, the same pool that already holds eighteen months of SATA's dividends. And the prospectus bars Strive from paying SATS anything "until and unless we first pay accumulated dividends in full on our SATA Stock". The account is Strive's, and so is the interest. The board decides each payment again. It may skip one "for any reason, even if we have sufficient funds".
So far, Strive has put more aside than it had to. It set the reserve at twelve months when it launched SATA last November. In March, with bitcoin falling, it raised the reserve to eighteen. It has carried no debt since May, and none of its bitcoin is pledged. In the presentation that launched SATS, chief executive Matt Cole said Strive "made no promises that we would even keep the reserve at twelve months". He meant it as a credit, and it is one. It is also an exact description of a reserve.
A reserve is not money set aside in your name but a decision a board renews every business day.
What pays the dividend after month 18?
Eighteen monthly payments use up the whole $22.50. The prospectus answers the nineteenth month in one sentence, tucked into its risk factors, and you read it aloud.
"Following the 18-month period after the Closing, we expect to fund any dividends paid in cash on the SATS Stock primarily through additional capital raising activities, including, but not limited to, at-the-market offerings of our securities."
An at-the-market offering means selling new shares into the market a few at a time, at whatever price the day offers. Strive plans to sell SATS this way once it lists. That model holds while buyers keep paying up for the shares. The prospectus lists what could stop it, from "the market price of our securities" to "the value of our bitcoin holdings".
After month 18, your dividend rests not on the bitcoin but on other people's appetite for Strive's next security.
That appetite is visible right now, on the stock ahead of yours. This month Strive made SATA's $100 minimum sale price binding. No new SATA can be sold below it. SATA held that line for weeks, then slipped below it on 7 October, six days before SATS was announced, and has closed below it every day since. Strive's own deck notes that trading below that line "inhibits price stability and cuts off ATM access".
The deck also puts a number on the long run, and Vera holds it apart from the others. Divide a year of dividends by everything the company owns. You get the growth those assets need to keep paying without shrinking. The deck's illustration gets 7.2% a year. On the final terms and Strive's 9 October holdings, it comes to about 7.8% (computed). Another slide says "Bitcoin alone covers 12 years of dividend obligations". It divides the coins' value by a year of dividends.
"Twelve years is how long it takes to sell every coin," Vera says.
Why the second preferred in line pays more
Your 16.7% raises a question you put to Vera directly. If SATS and SATA share a company and a reserve, why does SATS pay more? "Because your money is SATA's cushion before it is your income," she says. SATA, with $1.4 billion of stated amount, ranks ahead of SATS for dividends and in a liquidation, so every dollar SATS raises adds assets without adding a claim ahead of SATA.
Strive's deck counts this as assets per dollar of preferred. Before the deal, SATA had $2.18 behind each dollar. On the same basis, the final terms lift that to about $2.63, while SATS, counting SATA's claim ahead of its own, gets about $1.76 (computed).
In bitcoin prices it reads more plainly. Bitcoin could fall by about half, from the $82,500 Strive used to roughly $41,200, before everything Strive owns equals what both preferreds can claim (computed). SATA alone could stand a fall of nearly three-quarters.
Nothing in SATS's terms stops Strive from issuing more stock ahead of it or level with it, and Cole has said there is "no target trading range for SATS like there is for SATA". Nothing published so far sets a price below which new SATS won't be sold.
"What does SATS give up for the extra yield?" you ask.
| SATA | SATS | |
|---|---|---|
| Place in line | Senior preferred | Behind SATA, ahead of common stock |
| Dividend rate | Variable, 13% for October | Fixed 15% |
| Paid | Every business day since 16 June 2026 | Every business day from 9 Nov 2026, if declared |
| First sale price | $80 (Nov 2025) | $90 (Oct 2026) |
| Latest price | $97.85 (15 Oct close) | Not listed yet |
| Yield on that price | About 13.3% | About 16.7% |
| Stated amount outstanding | $1,403M | $700M from 20 Oct |
| Floor on new share sales | $100 minimum, binding since 13 Oct | None stated ("no target trading range") |
| If cash runs short | Paid in full first | Paid only after SATA is paid in full |
Next to SATA, SATS gives up its place in line, the floor on new share sales and its first call on the shared reserve. Strive may use the proceeds to buy back SATA, which would shrink the claim ahead of SATS. The use-of-proceeds list says only that it may.
The extra yield, more than three points, is not a perk but the price of standing second.
How to read the next bitcoin preferred stock dividend
SATS already has company. Smarter Web's MORE began trading in London on 14 October, with what Crypto Briefing called an "initial" 12% dividend, paid weekly. When the next term sheet lands, Vera will ask it what she asked SATS, and the questions carry over to any fixed rate someone has to manufacture.
The price against the stated amount goes first, because that gap turned SATS's 15% into a buyer's 16.7%. Then she weighs the reserve: how many months it covers, whose account holds it, what else draws on it, and whether the document says "intend" or something a court could hold the company to. After that comes the sentence on what pays once the reserve is spent. On SATS it sits in the risk factors. That money has a queue too, so she checks what ranks ahead, and whether the terms let the company put more there.
Even the tax pages say something about whose money this is. A payment counts as a dividend for US tax purposes only up to the company's "current or accumulated earnings and profits". Beyond that, the prospectus says, it is "a tax-free return of capital" that lowers your cost basis. Strive warns it may not have enough of them. The tax code knows nothing of dividend reserves. It may still file the money not as income but as your own capital coming back. Whether it does in your case is a question for a tax adviser.
The nineteenth month
Strive may keep refilling the reserve, as it has for SATA through a falling market, so that it never visibly runs down. That moves the date on the question without changing it. Whatever refills the reserve after the first deposit is mostly new money from new buyers. The first eighteen months were paid for at closing, and every month after that is paid for mainly by the next buyer of Strive's securities.
"A perpetual has no last month, and the reserve covers the first eighteen," Vera says.
Play the issuer: in the simulator, set $1,125 of your $5,000 aside as cash, eighteen months of 15% on the whole balance, and put the rest into bitcoin. The simulator pays no dividends, so strike $62.50 off the cash each month yourself and watch the bitcoin against that bill. When the cash runs out, the bitcoin alone has to earn about 19% a year to keep paying.
