UPDATED: STRIVE BOUGHT 1,800 BITCOIN AT $79,431 THE SAME WEEK AS STRATEGY — IT GREW ITS STACK 15 TIMES FASTER — NOW FIFTH-LARGEST, AND THE ANALYST WHO MODELED IT JUST TRIPLED HIS NUMBER

Strive bought 1,800 bitcoin between August 24 and 28 at an average of $79,431 a coin, about $143 million. Holdings go from 21,356 to 23,156. Strategy filed its own 8-K the same morning covering nearly the same window. Put them side by side and two things stand out. First, the pace. Strategy added 4,603 coins to a stack of 840,447 — half a percent. Strive added 1,800 to 21,356 — 8.4%. In percentage terms Strive grew its position roughly fifteen times faster than the company that invented this playbook. Second, how it was paid for. Strive never writes a funding sentence the way Strategy does — but the share counts give it away. Class A common outstanding rose by 3,579,147 to 83,470,035, and the Series A perpetual preferred rose by 803,099 shares, in the same window. Name the denominator and it is airtight: that is +4.48% on Class A alone, or +3.99% on Class A and B together, since Class B was flat. The share columns are dated Aug 21 and Aug 28, so that is the share window — the five days is the purchase span. Plus a new layer of preferred stacked on top. Cash went up, to $183.5 million, against a $143 million buy. So like Strategy, Strive raised more than it spent and never touched its cash. What the filing still doesn’t give you is the aggregate cost or the average price across all 23,156 coins. Both companies bought above this morning’s market, Strive at $79,431 and Strategy at $80,318 against roughly $78,000. That is a choice either can defend. Not showing the mechanics is a different kind of choice. A treasury strategy you cannot audit is a story you are being told, not a position you can check. UPDATE, 12:30 PM ET. 23,156 coins now makes Strive the fifth-largest bitcoin holder among public companies. TD Cowen, which had modelled 1,500 coins for the quarter, said the pace “meaningfully exceeded” its forecast and raised the number to 4,300. It lifted its price target to $32 from $28 and now projects 27,156 coins by year end — on an assumption that bitcoin trades at $97,500. Read that assumption twice. The analyst is not forecasting the company. He is forecasting the price of the thing the company buys, and then forecasting the company from that. The stock rose 6% on the day and is up about 165% in six months. When the model has to chase the filing twice in one quarter, the model was never the thing setting the pace.