---
title: "Metaplanet Sold 10,000 Bitcoin and Bought Back 11,000 to Prove It Could"
description: "The Tokyo treasury company ran a loss-making round trip on purpose, because credit rating agencies wanted receipts, not promises"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-05T12:04:01Z
modified: 2026-10-05T13:13:37Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/metaplanet-sold-10-000-bitcoin-and-bought-back-11-000-to-pro-2b9557
language: en
tags: ["bitcoin", "treasury", "strategy", "saylor", "rating-agencies", "business"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Metaplanet Sold 10,000 Bitcoin and Bought Back 11,000 to Prove It Could

*The Tokyo treasury company ran a loss-making round trip on purpose, because credit rating agencies wanted receipts, not promises*

By Nate Ledger · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/metaplanet-sold-10-000-bitcoin-and-bought-back-11-000-to-pro-2b9557

## In brief

- Metaplanet sold 10,000 BTC and repurchased 11,000 in Q3, ending September with 44,000 BTC, a net gain of 1,000
- It sold more than the full principal of its bonds and borrowings, held the cash, and left the debts outstanding
- The filing cited an unnamed overseas peer’s credit rating; S&P gave Strategy a B- in October 2025 citing low dollar liquidity
- Sold at an average ¥12.47 million per BTC and repurchased at ¥13.63 million, roughly 9% higher, costing about ¥25.2 billion net
- The sale generated a U.S. capital loss and an estimated $97 million deferred tax asset, preliminary and unaudited

Here is a trade that loses money on purpose. Metaplanet, the Tokyo-listed Bitcoin treasury company, disclosed that during the third quarter it sold 10,000 BTC and then bought back 11,000 BTC. The net effect was an extra 1,000 coins, taking its holdings to 44,000 BTC as of September 30, per BitcoinTreasuries, so if you only looked at the ending balance you might think it had a pleasant quarter of accumulation. It did not. It ran a very large, deliberately loss-making round trip, and the point of the exercise was not to make money but to make a point — specifically to credit rating agencies.

“Rating agencies and credit investors ask one question of a Bitcoin company: can that Bitcoin be turned into cash to meet obligations, and will it be?” chief executive Simon Gerovich tweeted. “We answered by doing it.”

The mechanics are worth dwelling on, because they are funny in a deadpan sort of way. Metaplanet’s argument, in its filing, is that Bitcoin’s liquidity is not really the issue; everyone agrees you *can* sell Bitcoin. What a rating agency wants to know is whether the issuer *will* sell it when debts come due, and a company promising “trust us, we’d totally sell” is just words. So Metaplanet sold an amount of Bitcoin greater than the entire outstanding principal of its bonds, borrowings and other interest-bearing liabilities, and held the proceeds in cash. It did not repay the debts. They remain outstanding on their original terms. At quarter end its liabilities net of cash and dollar stablecoins stood at ¥122.4 billion, against sale proceeds of ¥124.7 billion — which is to say, it demonstrated it could cover everything, and then left everything exactly where it was.

The filing points to “a previously published issuer credit rating of an overseas peer company” as the precedent: an issuer that refuses or is reluctant to sell its Bitcoin may find the asset given little weight in a credit assessment. Metaplanet didn’t name the peer, but S&P assigned Strategy a B- issuer credit rating in October 2025 — the first ever given to a Bitcoin treasury company — citing low dollar liquidity among its concerns and warning that a downturn could force sales at depressed prices. Strategy has since moved: it approved a Digital Credit Capital Framework in June permitting sales of up to $1.25 billion to fund its cash reserve, dividends and buybacks, and had sold 6,948 BTC for about $432.5 million by August. Michael Saylor, its chair, has quietly recast his famous stance as never being “a net seller” rather than never selling, and the firm has resumed buying, surpassing its previous record holdings late last month.

The difference in intent is the whole joke. Strategy sells Bitcoin to meet obligations. Metaplanet sold Bitcoin to prove it could, sat on the cash, and then bought back more than it sold.

## The bill for the demonstration

Proof like this is not free. Metaplanet sold at an average of ¥12.47 million per BTC and bought back at ¥13.63 million, roughly 9% higher. Do the arithmetic and the demonstration cost real money: it spent about ¥25.2 billion to end up with a net 1,000 extra coins, even though those coins were changing hands near ¥13.6 million each. The other ¥11.6 billion or so is, effectively, the fee it paid the market for the privilege of showing a rating agency it can sell. Imagine going to your bank manager, withdrawing your life savings in cash, fanning the notes out on the desk, saying “see, liquid,” paying a 9% round-trip charge, and redepositing slightly more than you started with. That is the trade. On purpose.

There is one mitigating quirk, in the way of these things. Because the coins it sold had originally been bought above the sale price, the disposal produced a capital loss for U.S. tax purposes, and the company estimates a deferred tax asset of about $97 million at subsidiaries of its U.S. holding company. That figure is preliminary and unaudited, and may not be recognized at all. And since Metaplanet carries Bitcoin at fair value, the loss doesn’t create a new accounting loss either. So the burn-money-to-build-credibility exercise also generated a maybe-asset. Sure.

What does Metaplanet want for all this? A credit rating — it says it now intends to pursue one — and a rebrand from “company that buys Bitcoin” into something grander. It says its Bitcoin Income Generation business has booked revenue for eight consecutive quarters. Gerovich said the holdings make Metaplanet the second-largest listed Bitcoin treasury company in the world, and that the strategy “was never simply to accumulate Bitcoin.” He also announced a Net Interest Income Strategy, which he said is “designed to create recurring income streams and lower our effective cost of capital,” alongside a pending Superplanet transaction and the build-out of Metaplanet Securities — a unified push, as he describes it, toward a Bitcoin-based financial institution.

One footnote: the accumulation is slowing whether or not the theater worked. Metaplanet added 2,823 BTC in the second quarter, itself a cooldown from earlier in the year; the third quarter’s net addition of 1,000 was roughly a third of that. The coins are, at least, now certified sellable.