- Public Bitcoin miners sold over 32,000 BTC in Q1 2026—surpassing the entire 2025 total and setting a new quarterly record.
- Companies like MARA and Cango are liquidating treasuries to fund the industry’s mass pivot from mining to AI infrastructure.
- CoinShares warns that another wave of miner capitulation is coming in H1 2026 unless Bitcoin’s price recovers materially.
Bitcoin miners are selling at a pace the industry has never seen. Publicly traded mining companies—including MARA, CleanSpark, Riot, Cango, Core Scientific, and Bitdeer—collectively offloaded more than 32,000 BTC during the first quarter of 2026, according to data from TheMinerMag reported by Cointelegraph. That figure surpasses the roughly 20,000 BTC dumped during Q2 2022, when the Terra-Luna collapse cratered the entire crypto market, and it blows past the total miner sales for all of 2025.
The numbers tell a grim story about mining economics. Hashprice—the revenue miners earn per petahash of computing power per day—has dropped to around $33, well below the $35 breakeven threshold for many operators, according to data from Hashrate Index. At that level, roughly 20% of the mining industry is running unprofitably, per CoinShares’ Q1 2026 Bitcoin Mining Report. “We expect further capitulation among higher-cost operators in H1 2026 unless BTC’s price recovers materially,” CoinShares said in the report.
Bitcoin Miners Are Selling BTC to Become AI Companies
The selling isn’t random desperation—it’s strategic repositioning. MARA Holdings, the largest listed US Bitcoin miner, sold 15,133 BTC for roughly $1.1 billion in March to repurchase $1 billion of zero-coupon convertible notes at a 9% discount, cutting its convertible debt by about 30%. The company’s CEO, Fred Thiel, said the move increased “strategic optionality” as MARA expands “beyond pure-play Bitcoin mining into digital energy and AI/HPC infrastructure.”
Cango, the world’s sixth-largest miner by hashrate, sold 2,000 BTC in March at an average price between $68,000 and $69,000—netting around $137 million to pay down Bitcoin-backed loans. The company also slashed its production cost by 19% to $68,215 per coin as part of what it called a “lean-production model.” Bitdeer went further, selling its Bitcoin treasury down to zero entirely in February as it pivots toward cloud and AI compute services.
The pattern is clear: mining companies are converting Bitcoin reserves into runway for a second act. MARA recently agreed to acquire a majority stake in Exaion’s AI-focused data centers. HIVE Digital committed $75 million to GPU infrastructure for AI workloads. Even smaller operators are reconfiguring facilities to run both Bitcoin mining and AI training from the same energy-intensive sites.
The irony is hard to miss. As miners dump Bitcoin to chase AI revenue, Michael Saylor’s Strategy is doing the exact opposite—buying aggressively. Strategy acquired $330 million in Bitcoin at an average price of $67,718 earlier this month, even as paper losses on its holdings exceeded $14.5 billion in Q1. Saylor signaled more purchases were coming with a characteristically understated post: “Think bigger.”
The miner shakeout has been building for months. Bitcoin’s Miner Reserve—a metric tracking all BTC held by miners—has dropped from 1.86 million coins at the end of 2023 to roughly 1.8 million today, according to CryptoQuant. The industry’s aggregate hashrate keeps climbing while block rewards stay flat post-halving, squeezing margins for everyone except the most efficient operators. Mining difficulty recently fell 7.7%, the steepest drop since 2021, as unprofitable machines went offline.
As of publication, Bitcoin is trading at approximately $74,625—still well below the $84,000 average production cost reported by many mid-tier miners in Q4 2025.