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Michael Saylor is blue (Dominic Gwinn/Getty Images)

Strategy misses Q4 earnings expectations

The largest corporate bitcoin holder reported results amid a widespread crypto crash.

Strategy, the largest corporate bitcoin holder, with 713,502 bitcoin, reported fourth-quarter earnings today that missed analysts’ earnings-per-share estimates. Shares were slightly down after-hours, but had already plunged 17% during Thursday trading alongside a widespread crypto crash, with the price of bitcoin falling below $64,000, a level not seen since 2024.

Shares are down 69% in the past year.

Revenue from its legacy software business stood at $122.8 million, just above analysts’ consensus estimate of $119.1 million, as compiled by FactSet. It reported a diluted loss per share of $42.93, way below expectations of a $0.08 loss.

But the main focus is on its bitcoin operations. Strategy purchased its bitcoin at an average price of $76,052 as of February 1. The company is now underwater on its holdings, and CoinDesk data shows that it faces a $6.5 billion unrealized loss.

Per the report, operating loss for the fourth quarter of 2025 included an unrealized loss of $17.4 billion on the company’s digital assets. In the fourth quarter of 2024, operating loss stood at $1 billion.

Strategy, with a $32.1 billion market cap (down from $75 billion in October 2025), has been trading below its crypto holdings, dipping under 1x mNAV (market-adjusted net asset value) and at 0.85x on Thursday, according to Bitcoin Treasuries.

Nic Puckrin, cofounder of Coin Bureau, told Sherwood News that now that bitcoin is in free fall, it leaves Strategy nursing a paper loss, but importantly, it’s not facing margin calls or forced liquidations.

“Its BTC isn’t pledged as collateral, and the first convert maturity isn’t until next year. Plus, the company has multiple potential levers, including refinancing, ATM issuance if mNAV stays above 1, and even limited bitcoin-backed lending. The bottom line is that MSTR has plenty of flexibility, regardless of where the Bitcoin price is going in the short term,” Puckrin said.

Earlier this week, Canaccord analysts slashed Strategy’s price target to $185 from $474, though they maintained a “buy” rating, CoinDesk shows.

Last month, TD Cowen analysts also lowered their price target on Strategy to $440 from $500, citing its “audacious” bitcoin buying and noting that “greater equity in the mix reduces BTC yield.”

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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