French Firm Capital B Moves to Build a European STRC-Style Bitcoin Credit Instrument
Capital B, a bitcoin treasury company listed on Euronext Growth Paris, is developing a perpetual preferred stock instrument modeled on Strategy's STRC and Strive's SATA products, with the explicit goal of offering European investors a route into bitcoin-funded yield that sidesteps the 30% US withholding tax applied to foreign holders of US-listed dividend securities.
The Paris-listed firm (ticker: ALCPB) disclosed the initiative ahead of a Combined General Meeting scheduled for June 17, 2026, where shareholders were set to vote on delegating authority to the board to issue up to €5 billion (approximately $5.46 billion) in new shares and up to €100 billion (approximately $116.4 billion) in credit instruments. The fundraising mandate, if approved, would give Capital B the runway to significantly expand its bitcoin holdings well beyond its current position.
What the Instrument Would Do
The proposed product belongs to a category that has been marketed under the label "digital credit." In practice, these are perpetual preferred stocks issued by bitcoin treasury companies that pay a fixed or variable dividend yield. They sit between common equity and debt in a company's capital structure, offering more stability than common shares but no guarantee of principal return and no collateral backing from the underlying bitcoin.
That label has drawn pointed criticism. A March 2026 Bloomberg newsletter titled "Digital Credit Is the Latest Code Word for Leverage Among Crypto Treasury Companies" argued directly that the terminology obscures the leveraged nature of these instruments, a perspective worth weighing when evaluating the category's rapid growth.
Strategy's STRC pays an 11.50% variable annualized dividend on a $100 stated value and has raised $5.58 billion year-to-date in 2026, a 189% increase. Strategy has paid out more than $693 million in cumulative dividends across 23 consecutive distributions. Strive's competing product, SATA, began paying daily dividends at a 13% annualized rate as of June 16, 2026.
Capital B CEO Alexandre Laizet has described the core thesis plainly. "The most profitable use of Bitcoin is as collateral," he said in a statement cited by French crypto publication La Crypto Monnaie. His team's argument is that a European-listed equivalent of STRC would attract investors who are currently locked out of US-listed instruments by tax friction rather than any fundamental objection to the product.
The Numbers Behind Capital B
As of June 1, 2026, Capital B held 3,139 BTC acquired at an average cost of approximately €90,418 per coin, equivalent to roughly $105,329. At current market prices, that position is worth around $209 million, leaving the company with an unrealized loss of approximately $121.6 million on its accumulated holdings. The company's market capitalization stands at around $123.9 million, placing its enterprise value at roughly $128.9 million. Its BTC yield, a metric the company uses to track per-share bitcoin accumulation, stood at 1.85% year-to-date as of June 1. Globally, Capital B ranks 26th among publicly listed companies by bitcoin holdings, trailing Germany's Bitcoin Group SE (3,605 BTC) and ahead of Empery Digital (2,914 BTC).
The firm previously raised €15 million with an option for an additional €100 million. Investors in that round included Adam Back, as well as Rothschild and Generali.
Why European Structure Matters
The legal and regulatory differences between US and European capital markets make a direct transplant of US-style instruments difficult. "If you issue convertibles in the US, the constraints are not the same as when you issue them out of a French balance sheet or a balance sheet in Europe," said Thomas Vogel, a partner at Latham and Watkins, at the Paris Blockchain Week 2026 conference.
Laizet has noted that companies in this space are leveraging French public markets and Luxembourg-based structures to navigate those constraints.
The timing adds another layer of complexity. The EU's MiCA framework, which governs crypto-asset service providers, reaches its hard compliance deadline on July 1, 2026. Any European-listed digital credit instrument could be required to operate within that framework, creating conditions that differ substantially from the US Securities and Exchange Commission environment that governs STRC and SATA.
Regional Implications for Emerging Markets
The tax arbitrage angle carries direct relevance for investors in South Asia, francophone Africa, and other regions where US-listed preferred stocks are largely inaccessible. Brokerage restrictions, currency convertibility rules such as India's FEMA regulations, and Nigeria's foreign exchange controls put instruments like STRC out of practical reach for many retail and institutional investors in those markets. A European-listed product structured under MiCA could offer a more accessible point of entry, particularly for institutional investors in countries such as Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal that already maintain financial ties to French capital markets. According to the 2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index, India ranks first globally, and four Sub-Saharan African countries now appear in the top 20, up from two in 2024, with Nigeria maintaining a near-top position and Kenya making a debut appearance.
The Africa angle has a concrete institutional precedent. Altvest Capital, listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, is recognized as the first publicly listed African company to hold bitcoin as a treasury asset, through its subsidiary Africa Bitcoin Corporation, which was actively acquiring bitcoin as of February 2026.
For investors in high-inflation emerging-market economies such as Pakistan, Ghana, and Ethiopia, the risk calculus carries an additional dimension. Layering leveraged bitcoin exposure onto existing currency volatility represents a compounded hazard, a concern raised in the Bloomberg critique of the digital credit category. The article's regional opportunity and the instrument's structural risks are not separable questions.
What to Watch
The June 17 shareholder vote is the immediate catalyst. If approved, the board delegation would set the legal framework for Capital B to begin issuing the instrument, though the timeline for any actual launch remains unclear. Industry participants at Consensus 2026 described the digital credit category as having grown from zero to roughly $10 billion in issuances in under one year and characterized it as "the second fastest product launch in capital markets history." Estimates of the long-term market opportunity reach as high as $3 trillion, based on the assumption that a 1% allocation from the $300 trillion global credit market would generate that figure.
Capital B's current unrealized loss, however, is a concrete reminder that the yield in these instruments must be funded through capital raises or operations when bitcoin prices fall, not through asset appreciation.