Adam Back’s BSTR Prepares to Buy 23,500 BTC at a Discount as $1.5B Bitcoin Treasury Goes Public

The Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company, the new vehicle led by a cypherpunk veteran who some suspect might be Satoshi Nakomoto, Adam Back, is preparing to deploy up to $1.5 billion into Bitcoin once it completes its public-market debut. At current prices, that war chest would buy roughly 23,500 BTC and lift the company’s total holdings past 53,500 coins — enough, by some counts, to rank it among the largest publicly traded Bitcoin treasuries behind Michael Saylor’s Strategy.

JAN3 chief executive Samson Mow, a backer of the launch and a prominent Bitcoin advocate, put the figures into circulation on June 23. He said $1.5 billion would secure an additional ~23,500 BTC at current prices, taking BSTR to a total of 53,500 coins.

$1.5B would get them an additional ~23,500 BTC at current prices for a total of 53,500 coins, wrote Mow on X

Bitcoin is changing hands near $62,500 as this is written, down roughly half from the $126,000 record set in October 2025. For a treasury company sitting on more than a billion dollars of dry powder, that drawdown is an attractive buying window.

With Bitcoin at, now could be a good time to buy Bitcoin, for individuals and treasury companies. Source: Brave New Coin

BSTR is not a public company yet. It is merging with Cantor Equity Partners I (CEPO), a blank-check vehicle sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald and chaired by Brandon Lutnick, son of US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Shareholders are scheduled to vote on the combination on June 26, after which BSTR is expected to list on Nasdaq under its own ticker.

If the deal clears, the company debuts with 30,021 BTC, contributed largely by founding shareholders including Back’s Blockstream Capital. The additional Bitcoin would be funded by more than $1.5 billion in PIPE financing arranged alongside the SPAC. Per the original deal terms, that package blends convertible senior notes, convertible preferred stock and common equity — a structure the company has described as the first convertible preferred round tied to a Bitcoin treasury SPAC merger.

Back, who built the Hashcash proof-of-work scheme that Bitcoin’s mining later drew on, has framed the venture in mission terms. Bitcoin “was created as sound money,” he said when the deal was announced, and BSTR is meant to bring that same standard to modern capital markets. The firm has also signaled ambitions beyond accumulation, including plans to build Bitcoin-denominated financial products and advise other corporates on treasury adoption.

Where Strategy built its position largely on the way up, BSTR is set to start buying on the way down — and that changes the arithmetic in its favor.

Strategy now holds 847,363 BTC bought for an aggregate cost above $64 billion, an average in the mid-$70,000s per coin. With Bitcoin trading well under that level, the position sits around $9.8 billion underwater on a mark-to-market basis. Saylor has continued to accumulate regardless, adding 520 BTC last week in a third consecutive weekly purchase and topping up a $1.4 billion cash reserve to cover dividend and debt obligations.

That backdrop is what makes a fresh $1.5 billion mandate notable. Mow has argued that the new financing can be put to work below Strategy’s average cost — a straightforward proposition while Bitcoin trades in the low $60,000s. A buyer entering today does so at a far lower basis than the firms that loaded up through 2024 and 2025, leaving more room for upside if the market recovers.

It also arrives at a quiet moment for the category. By CNBC’s reckoning, the share of new Bitcoin buying coming from treasury companies other than Strategy has fallen from roughly 95% in October 2025 to around 2% today, as the broader sell-off cooled the rush of imitators.

Mow’s projection puts BSTR second among public holders at 53,500 BTC, trailing only Strategy. That figure is plausible but worth treating as a target rather than a settled position. At launch with 30,021 BTC, earlier coverage placed BSTR around fourth, behind Strategy, Marathon and others; reaching the mid-50,000s would leapfrog several rivals. (Production note: I’d confirm the live ranking against BitcoinTreasuries.NET on publication day — the order around positions two through five shifts week to week as firms add to their stacks.)

The mechanics behind the model are familiar from Strategy’s transformation into a Bitcoin-first company: raise capital through equity and credit instruments, convert it into Bitcoin, and aim to grow the amount of Bitcoin backing each share over time. BSTR has indicated it will lean on put-selling and buyback mechanisms to support that dynamic once public.

The immediate catalyst is the June 26 shareholder vote. A yes clears the way for the merger to close, the Nasdaq listing to follow, and the $1.5 billion accumulation plan to begin in earnest. Mow’s view is that BSTR will move quickly once the structure is in place.

For a market that has watched the treasury-company trade go quiet through a long drawdown, the prospect of a new buyer arriving with more than a billion dollars to spend — at prices roughly half off last year’s peak — is the clearest near-term test of whether the corporate Bitcoin model still has momentum left in it.