The "HODL" playbook that defined publicly traded Bitcoin miners through 2024 and into 2025 is dead.
Key Takeaways
Public Bitcoin miners sold over 15,000 BTC between October 2025 and February 2026 — the sharpest treasury liquidation this cycle.
Margin pressure is at record levels, with hashprice falling below $30/PH/s and transaction fee revenue down 70%.
Companies like Core Scientific and Bitdeer are abandoning mining reserves to fund AI/HPC infrastructure pivots.
The HODL era for miners is effectively over — Bitcoin is now treated as operational cash, not a strategic asset.
Since October 2025, these companies have collectively offloaded more than 15,000 BTC from their treasuries — a five-month liquidation that signals something more structural than a routine sell cycle.
February 2026 was the worst of it. Miners unloaded roughly 6,100 BTC in a single month, the highest volume in the period. Cango (CANG) alone sold 4,451 BTC — about 60% of its reserves. Bitdeer (BTDR) went further, liquidating its entire Bitcoin treasury by early 2026. Core Scientific (CORZ), once sitting on 9,618 BTC at its peak, had roughly 630 BTC left by March 2026 after raising $175 million through sales. Riot Platforms (RIOT) sold approximately four times its monthly production in December 2025 just to cover acquisitions and keep operations running.
Even MARA Holdings — the largest Bitcoin holder among public miners with over 53,000 BTC on its balance sheet — quietly updated its treasury policy in March 2026 to permit discretionary sales for the first time. That’s a significant policy shift for a company that built its brand around accumulation.
The Economics Are Brutal
The trigger isn’t hard to identify. Bitcoin’s price slid from an October 2025 peak near $126,000, and the economics of mining deteriorated in tandem. Network difficulty kept climbing while transaction fee revenue collapsed — down 70% between May 2025 and January 2026. Hashprice, the revenue miners earn per unit of computing power, fell below $30 per petahash per second per day, pushing many publicly traded operations to or near their break-even threshold.
Analysts have called it the “harshest margin squeeze on record” for the sector. With energy costs fixed and Bitcoin revenue shrinking, selling treasury holdings isn’t a strategy — it’s a lifeline.
The AI Pivot
For several miners, the liquidation isn’t just about survival. It’s also about redeployment. Bitfarms, now rebranded as Keel Infrastructure, and Core Scientific are among the firms redirecting capital toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing data centers. The appeal is straightforward: AI infrastructure can generate operating margins in the range of 80–90%, compared to the increasingly thin margins of Bitcoin mining.
The hardware, power contracts, and facility footprints that miners built out during the bull market are being repurposed rather than written off. Bitcoin reserves, in that context, become startup capital for a different business entirely.
What Comes Next
The near-term outlook for miners who remain in the Bitcoin business depends heavily on price. Analysts have flagged $72,000 as a critical resistance level — if Bitcoin stays below it, selling pressure is expected to continue. A bearish flag pattern in the charts remains intact until that level breaks convincingly.
Some on-chain data offers a potential floor. Glassnode’s Hash Ribbon indicator has historically signaled capitulation phases approaching their end when inefficient miners begin going offline and the network adjusts. There are early signs that pattern may be playing out now, with weaker operators exiting and easing the competitive pressure on those that remain.
But the broader narrative has already shifted. The image of Bitcoin miners as long-term reserve holders — accumulating BTC the way a central bank accumulates gold — no longer reflects reality. Bitcoin is now a working asset on these balance sheets, liquidated when the business needs cash. For an industry that once treated selling as a last resort, that’s a fundamental change in posture.
