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Public bitcoin miners have unloaded more than 32,000 BTC in Q1 2026, establishing a new quarterly record and already exceeding total net sales for all of 2025.
Major operators including MARA, CleanSpark, Riot, Cango, Core Scientific, and Bitdeer contributed to the sell-off. Hashprice is currently around $33 per PH/s per day, below an estimated $35 breakeven level.
About 20% of miners are now operating at a loss as network difficulty rises and block rewards remain reduced.
The Q1 2026 sell-off is larger than the roughly 20,000 BTC liquidated during Q2 2022, a period marked by market turmoil following the Terra-Luna collapse.
Compared with the prior year, the shift is stark: miners ended 2024 with a net addition of 17,593 BTC, bringing combined reserves above 100,000 BTC.
Network difficulty today is approximately ten times higher than it was in 2021. Block rewards were also cut in half after the 2024 halving.
Bitcoin’s price remains above its previous cycle peak, even after pulling back from all-time highs above $120,000. Still, compressed margins are pushing many operators to liquidate holdings to cover daily operating costs.
Not all miners are responding to the downturn with sales. American Bitcoin, the proprietary mining arm of Hut 8, has been accumulating coins.
The company held more than 7,000 BTC as of early April, up from zero a year earlier. Its all-in cash production cost was around $55,000 per bitcoin in Q4 2025, or roughly $25 per PH/s.
Operators with very low power costs also retain a structural advantage. New West Data, a Canadian miner using flared natural gas, reportedly pays below $0.02 per kilowatt-hour for power. At that level, even older hardware can remain profitable at current hashprice levels.
New West Data tripled its compute capacity in 2025 and plans to do so again this year.
Beyond hardware and power sourcing, software optimization is increasingly used to manage profitability. Luxor recently launched Commander, a fleet management tool that adjusts power settings every five minutes.
The platform is reported to deliver 8% to 14% profitability gains compared with traditional curtailment methods. It currently manages about 5 EH/s of customer hashrate since its launch.
The industry is no longer operating as a single, uniform block. Differences in power economics, balance sheet strength, and operational sophistication are increasingly separating miners under strain from those better positioned to withstand hashprice pressure.
As hashprice pressure continues through 2026, the sector’s strategic divergence is expected to become more pronounced.
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