While Strategy could have faced significant tax bills on its unrealized gains on Bitcoin (BTC), a directive from the tax authorities has clarified the situation. Let’s take a closer look at this news, which has sent the share price soaring.
Strategy should benefit from this tax directive
For several quarters now, Strategy has adopted an accounting rule that allows it to recognize its unrealized gains on its Bitcoin (BTC) positions in its balance sheets. We discussed this in August, noting that this method allows it to significantly inflate its figures, obscuring the declining performance of its historical business in enterprise software.
However, such results were likely to subject Strategy to the “corporate alternative minimum tax” (CAMT), which, under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, imposes a minimum tax of 15% on companies with average annual revenues exceeding $1 billion.
Under these conditions, Michael Saylor’s company was likely to meet these requirements, but a statement from the U.S. tax authorities changed the situation this week, as reported by Strategy in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC):
On September 30, 2025, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service issued interim guidance that, among other things, clarifies that a company may disregard unrealized gains and losses on its digital assets when calculating adjusted financial income to determine its liability for the 15% corporate alternative minimum tax (CAMT) under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
Thanks to this subtlety, Strategy’s tax will be determined by its software sales activity, which generated revenue of $111.1 million in the first quarter and $114.5 million in the second quarter. Given that these quarterly figures have struggled to exceed $120 million in recent years, Strategy does not actually exceed the average of $1 billion in annual revenue.
Since the tax services announcement on Tuesday, Strategy’s MSTR stock has risen 9.82%. Despite this, the stock is still down nearly 23% from its annual high of over $457 last July:
At the same time, Strategy holds 640,031 bitcoins valued at $76.78 billion, representing nearly 76% of the company’s market capitalization. For its part, the price of BTC stands at $119,985 at the time of writing, up 1.2% over the last 24 hours.
