Bitcoin rally delivers $4.1 billion tax windfall for Strategy

The estimated benefit concerns the company’s own tax accounts and its September valuation-allowance adjustment.

The company disclosed 848,000 $BTC at an average purchase price of $75,440.70, including fees and expenses, as of Oct. 4 at 4 p.m. Eastern time. That later acquisition figure has a separate cutoff from the Sept. 30 accounting comparison.

Fund cost and shareholder break-even are separate

An ETF acquisition estimate measures the fund’s underlying holdings. Maketo estimated the average cost of Bitcoin remaining in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) at $81,188 per $BTC as of Oct. 2. Its model reconstructs underlying Bitcoin costs from daily money flows and prices.

An IBIT shareholder buys shares at a market price, so investors entering on different dates can have different break-even prices, even though their shares represent interests in the same pool of Bitcoin. The fund’s estimated acquisition cost measures a different position from each shareholder’s investment.

BlackRock’s Oct. 5 holdings file listed about 806,038 $BTC, and its fund page reported nearly $69 billion in net assets and a Bitcoin benchmark level of $85,694.41 that day.

Its June 30 quarterly filing recorded 734,261 $BTC with an investment cost of about $61 billion and a fair value of about $43.4 billion. That historical comparison places the same holdings below cost at the same cutoff.