Bitcoin zoomed past $81,000 in Asian hours on Tuesday, according to CoinDesk market data, up 6.7% on the week and riding on the broader risk band that has stocks posting records on fading Iran tensions and renewed AI optimism.
Other crypto majors caught the bid. Solana zoomed 3% to $87.35. Dogecoin added another 4% to $0.1158, extending its weekly gain to 14.5% as futures open interest is at a yearly high. XRP, BNB and TRX all printed green on the day.
Ether is the laggard, off 0.3% over 24 hours despite a 3.9% weekly gain of $2,376. Spot ETH ETF flows turned negative last week, ending a three-week inflow streak.
Wall Street gauges closed at all-time highs on Tuesday after President Donald Trump signaled progress toward a “final deal” with Iran and announced a brief pause on Operation Project Freedom. Brent crude fell 1.7% to around $108 a barrel. barrel. The dollar, which had been the safe haven of choice through the US-Israeli war against Iran, weakened against all its G-10 peers.
Asian shares zoomed to a record high on Wednesday morning, with the MSCI Asia Pacific index rising 1.8%. South Korea’s Kospi jumped more than 6% to a record, with Samsung Electronics rising 15% to reach a US$1 trillion valuation, the second Asian company ever to clear the mark.
Strong earnings from Advanced Micro Devices and Super Micro Computer added to AI trading’s momentum, with Nasdaq 100 futures up 0.6%.
A key development came when the strategy’s executive chairman, Michael Saylor, said in the company’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call that it may sell some of its bitcoin holdings to fund dividend payments.
“We will probably sell some bitcoin to pay a dividend just to inoculate the market and send the message that we did it,” Saylor said.
The world’s largest corporate bitcoin holder, sitting on 818,334 BTC at an average acquisition price of $75,537, has not sold any of his position before. The model has always been buy and hold.
The strategy posted a net loss of $12.54 billion in the first quarter as bitcoin’s decline from October’s peak of $126,000 weighed on the company’s mark-to-market accounting. The firm carries about $1.5 billion in annual dividend obligations across preferred stock and outstanding debt, with about 18 months of USD reserves to cover them at current run rates.
MSTR shares dumped over 4% in after-hours trading on the announcement, and BTC briefly fell below $81,000 before recovering.
Saylor framed the move as a feature of the model rather than a break from it.
“You buy bitcoin with credit, you let it appreciate, and then you sell bitcoin to pay the dividend.”
That’s a different phrase than every previous strategy quarter where the playbook had to issue more debt or equity to fund liabilities instead of touching the BTC stack.
