Prediction market platform Polymarket has assigned 82% odds to Strategy Inc. [NASDAQ: MSTR] selling at least a portion of its Bitcoin holdings before the end of 2026, a dramatic re-pricing from the low-to-mid 30% range that prevailed before executive chairman Michael Saylor made comments during the company’s first-quarter earnings call suggesting selective BTC sales might be considered.

The shift in prediction market odds followed Saylor’s statement on the May 5 earnings call that for every Bitcoin sold, the company would aim to buy 10 to 20 more, a framing that traders interpreted as a meaningful departure from the company’s longstanding public position of treating its Bitcoin treasury as inviolable.

Saylor’s subsequent walkback, published in Fortune magazine on May 8 in which he described the earnings call comment as a “brushback” directed at short sellers, moved the Polymarket odds by less than two percentage points, confirming that traders are focused on the underlying financial mechanics rather than management’s rhetorical framing.

Strategy currently holds more than 818,000 BTC with an average acquisition cost of approximately $75,500 per coin, a position that leaves only a modest buffer against loss when Bitcoin trades near the $80,000 level where it was trading at the time of the earnings call.

The company faces approximately $1.5 billion in annual dividend obligations tied to its expanding preferred share structure, including instruments issued under the STRK, STRF, STRD, and STRC programmes, obligations that require real cash rather than Bitcoin-denominated equivalents regardless of Strategy’s preference for accumulating the asset.

Previous funding approaches depended heavily on issuing equity at a premium to net asset value, a mechanism that has become less reliable as the premium itself has compressed in response to growing investor concern about the dividend stack and the company’s multi-billion dollar GAAP loss in Q1 2026.

The Polymarket market is not simply predicting that Saylor has abandoned his Bitcoin thesis, but rather pricing the probability that the dividend mathematics will eventually require a limited and targeted sale, with analysts noting that selling $1 billion to $2 billion worth of BTC would cover several quarters of dividend obligations without materially reducing Strategy’s overall exposure to the asset.

CEO Phong Le framed the calculus on the earnings call: “I believe in math over ideology. At the point where selling bitcoin versus selling equity to pay a dividend is better for our bitcoin-per-share, and for our common shareholders, we will do it.”

The broader market implications for Bitcoin are significant, as Strategy’s position as the largest corporate holder of BTC means any confirmed sale would represent both a real liquidity event and a psychological signal affecting every other corporate Bitcoin treasury holder’s thesis.