Two Roads to a Bitcoin Bank: How Metaplanet's Model Differs from Strategy's

For most of the past two years, the story of the Bitcoin treasury company has been a story about one firm. Strategy, the business Michael Saylor built out of the old MicroStrategy, wrote the playbook that everyone else now borrows from: raise money, buy Bitcoin, repeat, and watch the amount of Bitcoin behind each share climb over time. The newer arrivals — Strive with its SATA shares, and now Bitmine with its freshly listed BMNP — are all variations on that same theme.

Japan's Metaplanet looks, at first glance, like another tribute act. It holds a large pile of Bitcoin, its share price rises and falls with the coin, and it has been issuing the same sort of dividend-paying preferred shares that made Strategy famous. But look a little closer and Metaplanet is quietly building something with a rather different shape. This piece walks through how its two preferred share classes work, where they part company with Strategy's approach, and why an acquisition announced last week may matter more than any of it.

A quick reminder of what a preferred share actually is

If you already live and breathe this stuff, skip ahead. For everyone else, a preferred share sits somewhere between a bond and an ordinary share. Like a bond, it pays a regular, agreed income. Like a share, it has no fixed repayment date and ranks below the company's lenders if things go wrong. The appeal for a Bitcoin treasury company is simple: it can raise cash by selling these income-paying shares without handing out more ordinary shares and shrinking each existing owner's slice of the pie. The cash comes in, more Bitcoin gets bought, and the ordinary shareholders are not diluted in the process.

That is the engine. Now to the two machines Metaplanet has bolted onto it.

Metaplanet's two-tier design: MARS and MERCURY

Where Strategy offers a menu of separate, side-by-side products, Metaplanet has built a layered structure with two named tiers stacked on top of one another.

The senior tier is called MARS. It is the one that most closely resembles Strategy's flagship. MARS pays a dividend that adjusts every month, and it carries a clever self-righting feature: when the share trades below its set value the dividend rate rises to lure buyers back, and when it trades above, the rate falls. The aim is to keep the price hovering near its anchor rather than swinging about. MARS holders sit near the front of the queue for payment and cannot convert their shares into ordinary stock — they are there for the income, not the lottery ticket.

The junior tier is called MERCURY, and it is the one Metaplanet has actually sold so far, raising around 150 million dollars from large institutions late in 2025. MERCURY pays a fixed dividend of just under 5 per cent, but it comes with a twist MARS lacks: the right, much further down the line, to convert into ordinary shares. That makes it a hybrid — part steady income, part bet on the share price climbing. One of the company's own executives described it as part bond, part Bitcoin call option, part treasury accelerator, which is a fair summary.

Put simply, MARS is the pure income instrument — senior, stable, and non-convertible; MERCURY is the hybrid, trading a lower headline rate for a long-term bet on the ordinary share price.

Where this parts company with Strategy

Three differences are worth understanding, and none of them require a spreadsheet.

The income looks far lower — but mostly because of the currency. Strategy's headline preferred share recently paid north of 11 per cent. Metaplanet's pay low-to-mid single digits. On the face of it that looks like a chasm, and a casual reader might conclude Strategy is simply more generous. The real explanation is geography. A dollar-denominated share competes against American government bonds, which themselves pay a meaningful return, so it has to offer a good deal more to stand out. A yen-denominated share competes against Japanese savings rates that have sat near zero for years, so even a modest dividend looks attractive to a Japanese saver. Measured against their respective home backdrops, the gap is far narrower than the raw numbers suggest. This is the single most misunderstood point in the coverage of Metaplanet, and worth holding onto.

The way the shares reach the market is different. Strategy's great advantage is a mechanism that lets it drip its preferred shares into the open market continuously, day after day, which is how it has raised billions. That particular tool is not available in Japan in the same form. Metaplanet instead relies on a warrant-based structure and sales to selected institutions — effective, but more stop-start. The constraint on the Japanese firm has never really been investor appetite; it has been the plumbing for getting the shares out of the door. That matters, because it points to where the company has just spent its money.

The structure is layered rather than flat. Strategy sells several separate preferred products in parallel, each aimed at a slightly different buyer. Metaplanet has built a single ladder — senior MARS, middle MERCURY, ordinary shares at the bottom — which is closer to how a traditional company organises its finances. It is a tidier, more conventional arrangement, and arguably an easier one for a cautious investor to read.

Last week's move: buying the shop, not renting the shelf

On 12 June, Metaplanet announced what several outlets called a tie-up with a financial firm. That undersells it. The company is not partnering with anyone — it is buying a securities firm outright, paying around 13 million dollars for full ownership of a licensed Japanese brokerage called Siiibo, which it will rename Metaplanet Securities once the deal closes this summer.

The reason this matters connects directly to that plumbing problem. Siiibo holds a licence that allows it to create and sell investment products directly to ordinary Japanese savers, and it already runs an online platform that has handled more than a hundred bond sales. By owning it, Metaplanet acquires its own distribution channel and the regulatory permission to manufacture financial products in-house. Rather than depending on overseas institutions to take its preferred shares, it could in time issue Bitcoin-backed bonds and preferred shares and sell them straight to the Japanese public.

And the size of that public is the whole point. Japanese households sit on something in the region of 7.4 trillion dollars held in cash and low-yielding deposits. Metaplanet's bet is that, with inflation nibbling at the value of those savings, some of that money will go looking for a return — and that a Bitcoin-backed product sold through a familiar, regulated, Japanese brokerage is exactly the bridge a cautious saver might be willing to cross. The company can begin with its own register of roughly a quarter of a million existing shareholders. This is what its leadership calls “Project Nova”, a plan to turn a company that simply holds Bitcoin into one that builds and sells financial products on top of it.

It is, in spirit, the same destination Saylor once described for Strategy — the idea of becoming a sort of Bitcoin bank. The difference is method. Strategy talks about building those instruments; Metaplanet has gone out and bought the licensed firm that can distribute them.

The honest caveats

None of this is happening in a calm market, and it would be misleading to pretend otherwise. Bitcoin has fallen sharply over the past year, Metaplanet recently reported a heavy paper loss from marking its holdings down to current prices, and the value the market places on the company has slipped just below the value of the Bitcoin it actually owns. In that situation the firm's own chief executive has said he would seriously consider buying back ordinary shares rather than issuing new ones — which is the opposite of expansion. So the near-term signal is caution, not a fundraising spree.

The acquisition is best understood as building the road before the traffic arrives. The securities firm it is buying is itself loss-making and small, the new products will all need regulatory sign-off before they can launch, and the whole plan rests on Japanese savers eventually warming to the idea. Whether that happens is genuinely unknown.

But as a statement of direction, it is a clear one. Strategy showed the world that a public company could turn itself into a vehicle for accumulating Bitcoin. Metaplanet is testing whether the next step is to turn that vehicle into a shop — one that sells the income-paying instruments built on a Bitcoin balance sheet directly to the people whose savings have nowhere productive to go. Two firms, the same starting point, and increasingly two different roads.

This article is for general information and education. It is not investment advice, and the author is not a financial adviser. Crypto-linked preferred shares are volatile and may not be suitable for all investors. Always do your own research.