Strategy CEO Phong Le said the company plans to resume accumulating Bitcoin later this year, even after shifting business priorities prompted it to sell portions of its holdings in moves that drew scrutiny from the market.

In a Monday interview with FOX Business, Le said Strategy had purchased around 175,000 Bitcoin since the beginning of the year while selling roughly 7,000 BTC, making the company a significant net buyer.

That is “about 25 times more” buying than selling, Le said. He added that Strategy has moved from being the world’s second-largest institutional Bitcoin holder to the largest.

“We’ll get back to buying more Bitcoin throughout the course of the year,” Le said.

Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, began converting its corporate treasury into Bitcoin in 2020 under then-CEO Michael Saylor. The company has since rebranded and positioned itself as a Bitcoin development entity, making its treasury decisions a closely watched barometer for corporate adoption of digital assets.

Strategy CEO Phong Le appears on FOX Business. Source: FOX

While Strategy has accumulated more than 840,000 BTC, it has sold Bitcoin on four occasions since May, with the most recent sale totaling 1,690 BTC. The company has used proceeds from its recent sales to support preferred stock dividends, share repurchases and its US dollar reserve.

Despite the relatively small size of the sales compared with its overall holdings, Strategy has faced scrutiny for departing from its long-standing “never sell” approach to Bitcoin. The shift highlights the competing demands facing Strategy as a public company, including obligations to common and preferred shareholders alongside its Bitcoin accumulation strategy.

Related: Strategy unveils capital framework to preserve Bitcoin exposure, pay dividends

BTC treasury model faces pressure amid bear market

The corporate Bitcoin treasury model has come under pressure as weaker market conditions challenge the economics that helped fuel its rapid expansion. Public companies hold more than 1.26 million BTC, trailing exchange-traded funds and other funds, which hold more than 1.6 million BTC, according to BitcoinTreasuries.NET.

The model has historically benefited from a financing cycle in which Bitcoin treasury companies traded at premiums to the value of their BTC holdings, allowing them to raise capital through equity or debt and use the proceeds to buy more Bitcoin, according to Novaque Research.

However, that cycle becomes more difficult to sustain when companies trade below the net asset value of their Bitcoin holdings because raising new capital becomes increasingly dilutive to shareholders.

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