Public miners sell bitcoins as an industry divide between sales and quality growth

This article originally appeared on Mining Weekly, Bloxbridge Consulting's weekly newsletter on energy, computing, infrastructure and data analytics from TheEnergyMag. Sign up to receive it once a week in your inbox.

Several major public miners, including MARA, CleanSpark, Riot, Cango, Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ ) and Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR ), have sold more than 32,000. BTC in the first quarter of 2026, according to data analyzed by TheEnergyMag. The data set remains incomplete as first quarter earnings reports are still pending.

Still, the figure is set to surpass total net sales in all four quarters of 2025, setting a new industry record of nearly 20,000 units. BTC During the market turmoil triggered by the collapse of Terra-Luna in the second quarter of 2022, public miners liquidated.

The reverse is striking. Just a year ago, miners were accumulating power, ending 2024 with a net increase of 17,593. BTC And pushing more than 100,000 combined reserves BTC.

The transition comes as hashrate — a key industry metric that measures expected mining revenue per unit of computing power — hovered in the low $30/PH/s range, with prices at all-time lows. At those levels, margins are compressed or outright negative, especially for operators with older, less efficient fleets or higher energy costs.

Today's stress has its origins in the tyranny of industry. Hashrate In the year Expansion following China's mining ban in 2021 – In hindsight, it will accelerate huge growth at each company's own expense.

For context, bitcoinThe current price – although it has retreated from a peak above $120,000 – is higher than the peak of the previous cycle. However, network difficulty is now 10 times higher than in 2021, and block rewards are halved by 2024. Accordingly, mining profitability has compressed to a higher order, which helps explain the recent wave of selling.

But the record Liquid extraction It doesn't tell a coherent story. Rather, it shows that an industry is beginning to fragment – ​​with some operators forced to sell into weakness, while others rely on structural advantages or capital discipline to avoid failure.

It is an immediate priority for many. Liquidity. sell bitcoin It remains the fastest way to accumulate balance sheets, finance operations and meet debt obligations in a selective and expensive financial environment.

Others are taking a more measured approach. American Bitcoin (ABTC), Hut 8's proprietary miner (NASDAQ: HUT ), has doubled in stock. bitcoin Both in mining and market purchases. Since the beginning of April, it has built more than 7,000 stocks BTCIt rose from zero a year ago, pushing the title Hashrate Up to 28 EH/s.

But the company isn't repeating last cycle's hashret-at-all-costs playbook. ABTC President and Interim CFO Matt Prusak told TheEnergyMag that the focus is on quality growth in the current market environment.

“We don't make deals that we don't think we can win…. When you see people chasing Hashrate And chasing big hash numbers, that wasn't our style.” “Having the biggest fleet doesn't matter to me,” Prusak said.

Unlike many publicly traded peers, ABTC expanded its hardware fleet when demand for ASICs cooled. In the year Got 15 EH/s Antminer S21 series from Bitmain with around 3,000 pledges in summer 2025. BTC – Repayable in 24 months – Instead of paying cash. Such a structure was impossible in the previous market conditions. The promised price bitcoin Since then, it has decreased by about 40%, and Bitmain cannot Liquid Unless ABTC elects not to redeem the collateral.

Based on Q4 2025 data analyzed by TheEnergyMag, ABTC's cash production cost was around $55,000 per unit. bitcoinor roughly $25/PH/s – among the lowest in public mining. This allows for the accumulation of newly produced stock bitcoin Discount at market price.

even if bitcoin Falling below that level, Prusak said the company retains the flexibility to allocate with variable capital. ABTC raised $240 million in market offerings by 2025 and another $110 million in the first quarter of this year.

“We don't have to copy AI, we a bitcoin Classification. if so bitcoinIt is expensive in terms of cost to me. if so bitcoinIt's cheap relative to the miner, so we buy it. Adding: “We are not interested in selling at this time. … We are collecting.”

But for private operators without comparable access to capital, the difference in strategy is increasingly driven by one of the industry's oldest variables: energy costs.

Sean McDonough, president and CEO of New West Data, a Canadian oil producer bitcoin Using off-grid energy generated by burning nature Gas From its own fuel fields, the company's effective energy cost is less than $0.02 per kilowatt-hour. That means, in some cases, a third of what large public miners pay.

At that level, even inefficient machines remain profitable. At a hash rate of around $30/PH/s, a miner paying $0.02/kW/h can sustain a flight efficiency of around 60 J/TH. According to McDonough, this allows the company to acquire older generation devices at lower costs while maintaining profit margins, especially as ASIC prices continue to decline along with hash prices.

That cost advantage has allowed New West Data to expand even as it shrinks. The company has tripled both oil production and bitcoin Calculate capacity by 2025 and it is expected to triple again this year. It currently operates about 15 megawatts of computing power, all powered by fossil fuels. Gas from the sites itself.

Still, it burned Gas It represents a good model that requires expertise in high oil production rather than traditional power purchases through utilities or long-term power purchase agreements.

In the absence of ultra-low-cost energy, mine operators are turning to operational optimization to protect margins.

Luxor, A Bitcoin mining Pool Operator, an ASIC broker and software provider, launched a fleet management tool called Commander earlier this month. The platform uses automated algorithms to assess hashrate and power market conditions every five minutes, dynamically adjusting power settings across a fleet based on real-time economics.

The goal is to optimize production from existing infrastructure. Luxor claims that internal measurements show an 8% to 14% improvement in profitability compared to traditional on/off systems.

The shift to software reflects a wider reconfiguration in the industry. With hashrate prices under pressure, upgrading to new machine upgrades often requires capital outlays due to individual returns.

Instead, operators are focusing on extracting better margins from their existing fleets – getting as much efficiency as possible.

Ethan Vera, Luxor's chief operating officer, said the Commander platform has increased its client hashrate to 5 EH/s since its launch. It complements the company's firmware solution, LuxorOS, introduced in 2022, which now supports approximately 45 EH/s, or 5% of the global network.

In a recent study, Luxor, a publicly traded bitcoin miner with colocation and owned mining facilities in Soluna, Texas, was able to accelerate recovery times for 1.1 EH/s fleets through LuxorOS, improving downtime after reduced incidents by 50%, without additional operational costs, Luxor said.

All told, the industry can no longer operate in lockdown. What was once a relatively uniform business model characterized by scale and hashrate growth is fragmenting into survival and quality growth strategies shaped by power economics, balance sheet flexibility and operational complexity.

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