Strategy Swings to $1.4 Billion Bitcoin Profit as BTC Tops $77,000

• Strategy’s 840,447 BTC returned to an unrealized gain of roughly $1.4 billion on Friday, August 21, after Bitcoin climbed above the company’s $75,385 average purchase price.
• The swing reverses a paper loss of about $13 billion booked in July, when Bitcoin traded near $58,000.
• U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs absorbed $606 million on Thursday, their largest single-day intake since May, as forecasts from Standard Chartered and Coinbase moved higher.

Strategy Inc. swung to a $1.4 billion unrealized Bitcoin profit on Friday, August 21, after $BTC climbed above the $75,385 average price the company paid for its 840,447 coins. Shares of the Michael Saylor-led firm rose 10% in pre-market trading, extending a three-day breakout that cleared the $105 resistance level, which had rejected four attempts since July.

Bitcoin added almost 22% across five consecutive sessions, and at July’s low near $58,000, Strategy’s unrealized loss had reached $13 billion, equal to 20.4% of its total Bitcoin cost basis. The largest cryptocurrency hit an intraday high of $79,319 on Friday before easing back toward $77,600.“The rally is primarily a macro story rather than a crypto-specific one,” said James Butterfill, head of research at CoinShares. He linked the move to the Treasury’s plan to bring down long-dated bond yields, a lower-than-expected CPI print, and weaker payrolls data, and called $80,000 an important boundary for the price.

ETF Flows Underwrite the Strategy Bitcoin Profit

U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in roughly $606 million on August 20, according to SoSoValue data, following about $517 million on August 19 and producing more than $1.1 billion of combined net buying across the two sessions. That was the category’s biggest day since early May. Weekly inflows reached $1.61 billion through Thursday, the strongest of 2026 so far. Fox Business described the move as Bitcoin’s “best week since 2024.”

Forecasts Climb With the Price

Geoffrey Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, told clients his $100,000 year-end call may now be conservative. “Once investors remember how quickly prices can accelerate to the topside, and we get past the 6 October date (12 months after the all-time high), an overshoot towards the all-time high (USD126k) before year-end may be possible,” Kendrick wrote.

Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong set a longer horizon. “I’d say by 2030, I think it’s very likely we’ll see $300,000-$400,000 Bitcoin,” Armstrong said on Fox Business, after being asked whether Bitcoin would reach $100,000 by the end of this year. At those levels, Bitcoin would compete for capital with the world’s largest asset classes.

Traders are pricing that optimism more slowly. Prediction market data circulating Friday put the odds of Bitcoin returning to $100,000 during 2026 at 28%, higher than earlier in the week and still short of a coin flip.

The Gain Is Still on Paper

Strategy’s leverage to the price runs in both directions. A $1,000 move in Bitcoin changes the position’s market value by approximately $840.4 million, and an unrealized gain delivers no cash unless the company sells or borrows against the holdings. Strategy has repurchased roughly $347 million of STRC over four weeks, deploying more than a third of its $1 billion buyback authorization, while STRC trades near $95.62 against a June low of $71.

The company also built its U.S. dollar reserve to $4.8 billion, covering 2.8 years of dividend payments and other obligations. The next test arrives at $80,000, with U.S. ETF trading closed over the weekend.

Editorial Note: Reported and edited by the Crypto India Magazine editorial team. We use AI tools to assist with research and drafting; every article is reviewed and fact-checked by our editors.

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