Bitcoin is slumping again. Its biggest corporate owner admits it may have to sell if things get worse.

BTC-USD +6.21% DX-Y.NYB -0.10% MSTR +5.78%

The biggest corporate holder of bitcoin has announced a U.S. dollar dividend reserve of more than $1 billion, days after its top executive laid out what might force the company to sell some of its $56 billion in bitcoin holdings.

Strategy MSTR, formerly known as MicroStrategy, announced Monday that it will establish a $1.44 billion reserve “to support the payment of dividends on its preferred stock and interest on its outstanding indebtedness.” The reserve was funded by sales of its Class A common stock, and Strategy plans to keep sufficient reserves to fund its dividends for at least 12 months.

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The bitcoin treasury company said that based on an assumed year-end bitcoin price BTCUSD range of $85,000 to $110,000, the company would report, for the full year, something between a loss of $5.5 billion and a profit of $6.3 billion.

Since bitcoin peaked on Oct. 6, the cryptocurrency has lost 31%, while Strategy’s stock has tumbled 53%. However, the correlation between bitcoin and the stock has increased during the selloff, with the correlation coefficient rising to 0.97 (a correlation of 1.00 means two assets always move in the same direction) compared with a year-to-date correlation of 0.55. Bitcoin was down by more than 5% on Monday at $86,262.

The latest update from Strategy comes just days after CEO Phong Le said on a podcast that the company would have to sell bitcoin if its multiple to net asset value — a valuation metric known as mNAV that divides the company’s market capitalization by the market value of the bitcoin it holds — fell below 1.

“So now, as we’re looking at bitcoin winter, as we see our mNAV compressing, my hope is our mNAV doesn’t go below 1. But if we did and we didn’t have other access to capital, we would sell bitcoin,” he said in the podcast interview, published on Friday. “That would be a last resort.”

The mNAV for the company, whose shares are down 38% in 2025, currently stands at 1.19 but reached as high as 2.5 in 2024 and was around 1.7 in June. An mNAV above 1 means Strategy trades at a premium to its bitcoin holdings.

Read: Chanos declares victory in his bet vs. Strategy’s Saylor

“We don’t really want to be the company that’s selling bitcoin,” Le said. “We have the most bitcoin. Us selling bitcoin wouldn’t be good for the ecosystem. It wouldn’t be good for the narrative.”

The CEO said he remains optimistic on bitcoin going forward, saying that as long as the cryptocurrency can double the performance of the S&P 500 SPX — gaining, say, 30% a year, compared with the index’s 14% — then “we’re going to win.”

“I think for the foreseeable future we’re still talking 50% to 40% annualized returns over a four- to five-year period,” he said. “It’s an amazing technology, it is an amazing store [of] value asset, it’s nonsovereign, it has a limited supply.”

Bitcoin weakness on Monday came as U.S. stocks were under pressure in the kickoff to the last trading month of the year. The two asset classes have been increasingly correlated this year, driving unease for investors when bitcoin runs into selling pressure, as it has in recent weeks.

Read on: Why bitcoin’s brutal drop from an October record high is now a crucial barometer for the broader market

Tomi Kilgore contributed.

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