Despite being an ardent bitcoin advocate and shareholder of Strategy, Bitcoin Policy UK CEO Susie Ward still has some concerns when it comes to the world's largest digital asset treasury firm.
Ward recently told The Block during an interview at last week's BTC Prague conference that she considered a video shown by Strategy's Michael Saylor, promoting STRC, to mischaracterize the investment's risk profile.
"It's the risk I'm uncomfortable with. I don't think the risk is explained," said Ward. "Saylor put out a video talking about his yield with STRC ... it was making it out that there is no risk involved, and I thought it was really dishonest."
Selling STRC, a perpetual preferred share offering a whopping 11.25% dividend, has helped Strategy further pursue its bitcoin accumulation plans as the company funnels proceeds from the shares into buying more BTC.
Ward sees the concept of selling these types of shares to raise capital to buy bitcoin as problematic.
Some Wall Street analysts, however, believe in Strategy's vision and expect the stock to eventually increase in value alongside the price of bitcoin.
In general, Ward has serious doubts about companies adopting the BTC treasury strategy popularized by Saylor at Strategy. Although she can see the sense in a company keeping some of its free cash flow in bitcoin, leveraging itself to buy BTC is imprudent, from her perspective.
"You have all the different layers of financial engineering, so you could dilute your shareholders. You issue more stock, you sell it, you dilute your shareholders, you raise money, you buy bitcoin," said Ward. "That's almost the opposite of why we like bitcoin. We like bitcoin because it can't be inflated, because of its scarcity, that's what makes it special."
When bitcoin's price started to rise precipitously last year, many companies jumped on the trend and followed Strategy's playbook, reinventing themselves as digital asset treasury companies. Many of these companies began borrowing or raising money from traditional capital markets to buy BTC.
Ward disapproves, saying that's combining bitcoin's reputation with "fiat games" to launch projects, she argues, look a lot like memecoin, pump-and-dump style investment schemes.
"Just look at the chart, it goes up to some crazy amount, comes back down, and then that's it," said Ward.
Like Strategy, bitcoin treasury companies' share prices are tightly correlated to the price of bitcoin, which has lost nearly 50% in value since hitting a peak in October 2025.
Strategy' shares (MSTR), trading at about $132 on Monday, are down over 60% during the past year.
For its part, Strategy said Monday it had purchased an additional 1,587 BTC for approximately $100 million at an average price of $63,024 per bitcoin, bringing its total holdings to 846,842 BTC.
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