STRC rebounds to $100 as quantum fears divide crypto leaders

Strategy’s STRC, the company’s perpetual preferred stock, finished Friday’s trading session back at $100 par. The rebound provides the firm with an opportunity to sell equity and fund additional Bitcoin purchases.

STRC ended May 8 at $99.99 and reached $100 in extended trading, with liquidity at over $218 million. It took 10 trading sessions for the stock to recoup its dividend dip, consistent with its typical recovery cycle. 

Michael Saylor suggests they could sell their BTC holdings

STRC uses a dynamic dividend mechanism to protect its $100 face value. It hikes yields when prices drop, thereby stimulating demand. Earlier, Strategy’s executive chairman, Michael Saylor, shared that they could use Bitcoin sales to meet yield obligations.

“We’ll probably sell some Bitcoin to fund a dividend just to inoculate the market,” he said during the firm’s Q1 earnings call Q&A session.

Strategy President and CEO Phong Le also noted the firm would offload Bitcoin if it proved advantageous for shareholders. As a result, this week, more traders have been betting on the prediction platform Myriad that Strategy could sell its BTC. Currently, over 82% wager on an offload. At the moment, the company’s Bitcoin treasury currently totals more than 818,000 coins, worth over $65 billion.

On the other hand, some believe Strategy could resume BTC purchases as early as Monday, May 11. However, data from the STRC ATM tracker shows the firm has only raised enough for a bit over 8 BTC.

Nonetheless, the company could still drop dividend rates to offset excess STRC buying. Since March, STRC offerings have brought in $1.5 billion. That’s about roughly 33% of the stock’s $5 billion total value. Cumulatively, 80% of STRC shares are in retail hands compared to 40% for MSTR, according to Phong Le.

Is Bitcoin safe in a post-quantum era?

Meanwhile, there’s still panic in the industry over post-quantum security and migration. Over $3 trillion in digital value may be at risk of theft in four to seven years, per Project Eleven’s analysis.

However, BitGo’s CEO, Mike Belshe, has dismissed Project Eleven’s research, arguing that the firm benefits from heightened fears around quantum computing and could be trying to cultivate those fears.

Primarily, Project Eleven has centered its business model on developing infrastructure for the post-quantum era. According to its report, elliptic curve digital signatures, which protect most digital assets, are at risk from quantum computing. It also contended that the same public-key cryptography used by Bitcoin, Ether, and most stablecoins could be compromised.

Additionally, it stated that using Shor’s algorithm, future quantum computers could derive a private key from a public one and forge signatures to drain wallets. Current encryption standards may fall to quantum attacks as early as 2030, or by 2033 at the latest, the report said. 

What’s more worrying is the report’s 5- to 10-year migration timeline, which complicates the shift toward quantum-resistant blockchains.

For Bitcoin, the transition could be even trickier. The report cited that past upgrades lagged and most times divided the community. For instance, the Bitcoin SegWit upgrade was delayed for two years and led to a major, high-conflict chain split.

Besides, an estimated 1.7 million BTC are stuck in older P2PK addresses that already exposed their public keys on-chain. Some are suspected to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto, while countless others are considered permanently lost. Moreover, as reported earlier by Cryptopolitan, Google Quantum AI estimated that up to 6.9 million BTC could be at risk from quantum computing.

At the moment, the Bitcoin community remains divided over adopting quantum-resistant signatures, with many debates centered on potential hard forks that could undermine confidence in the network. Some proposals point to Lamport signatures or BIP-361 as migration options.

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