I’ve seen plenty of treasury companies file 8-Ks, but this is the first time I’ve seen Fidelity Digital Assets lay out the entire “perpetual preferred stock” pipeline and tally it all up.
As of October 5, these instruments had helped fund purchases of 135,979 $BTC—more than 0.5% of the maximum supply. The product pool is about $12 billion. Compared with the global fixed-income market of roughly $150 trillion, Fidelity’s own analogy is a pyramid made of stones: only 153 blocks have been laid so far.
The model is straightforward: companies issue high-yield perpetual preferred shares (with no maturity date and dividends that can be paid daily) and use the cash to accumulate $BTC. Preferred shareholders earn the yield; they don’t necessarily touch the coins. Strategy got the ball rolling in July 2025, followed by Strive and others. In the March–May quarter alone, they bought over 95,000 coins, raising more than $7 billion; in one week in April, they bought nearly 30,000. By comparison, spot BTC ETPs accumulated about 888,000 coins in their first year. This “debt-like funding” channel is still small in scale, but it works on a different entry logic.
Fidelity spells out the key point: it only works for the issuer when the rise in the coin’s price outweighs the cost of interest. Rising rates, liquidity, deferrable dividends, and issuer credit risk mean preferred stockholders and direct coin holders face different risks.
So don’t treat 135k as just another way of saying “ETF inflows are back.” One group is seeking spot exposure; the other wants dividends. The latter is more like redirecting checks from the fixed-income drawer to the coin-accumulation ledger.
Source: Zack Wainwright, Fidelity Digital Assets, “Perpetual Preferred Stock: The Newest Demand Catalyst in Bitcoin” (2026-10-20); as reported by crypto.news.
This is not investment advice.