Block reward miners continue to lose money, sell their BTC, and pivot to artificial intelligence (AI), all the while insisting that someone else will surely step up to shoulder the burden of ensuring network security.
The BTC network’s mining difficulty rate took a sharp downward turn on March 20, falling nearly 7.8%, the second-largest decline this year (following February’s weather-related 11% decline). It currently takes 133.8 trillion hashes (the average number of guesses required to ‘find’ a new block on the network) to claim the 3.125 BTC block reward.
This most recent decline stems from the ongoing ‘pivot to AI’ by most publicly traded miners, who yearn for the more predictable revenue streams that come from serving as data centers for AI and other high-performance computing (HPC) tasks.
As of Thursday afternoon, the network’s hashprice (revenue per unit of computing power) sat at $32.85 per petahash per second per day, better than February’s $28 but still dangerously close to the breakeven point of all but the most modern ASIC mining rigs.
Once you factor in miners’ periodic need to upgrade their mining fleet to remain competitive, the overall economics look even worse. The average all-in cost of mining a single BTC currently stands at ~$78,600, roughly $10,000 above BTC’s current price. Thanks to the difficulty decrease, that’s a far more favorable scenario than at other points this year, when that negative margin topped $20,000.
Coinshares’ latest mining report covering the final three months of 2025 called it “the most challenging quarter for Bitcoin miners since the April 2024 halving.” The ongoing AI pivot means that publicly traded miners “could derive as much as 70% of their revenues from AI by the end of this year, up from roughly 30% today. What began as a marginal diversification strategy is increasingly becoming the core business.”
As a result, miners have begun selling off the BTC they previously stockpiled in their ‘treasuries’ to fund this pivot. Earlier this month, MARA (NASDAQ: MARA) hinted that it was preparing to abandon its previous strategy of holding BTC “as a long-term investment.” On Thursday, MARA announced that it had sold 15,133 of its 53,822 BTC between March 4 and 25 for ~$1.1 billion, money the company says it will use to repurchase around $1 billion worth of its debt.
The irony here is high, given that MARA took on significant debt to buy BTC on the open market, much of it at significantly higher prices than BTC is currently worth. For instance, MARA bought 4,267 BTC last year at an average price of $111,000, around $42,000 more than the token is trading for as of Thursday afternoon, putting those tokens roughly $180 million in the red.
Regardless, the market cheered MARA’s debt reduction (and possibly the reduction in the number of its digital gold bricks), pushing its share price up over 10% in early Thursday trading before closing up 3.6% to $8.58.
MARA’s own pivot to a “vertically integrated digital infrastructure company” is well underway following its joint venture deal with Starwood Digital Ventures, which will see MARA convert many of its mining operations to AI/HPC.
MARA is a financial backer of American ASIC manufacturer Auradine, which earlier this month announced it was rebranding as Velaura AI, “starting a new chapter in our company’s evolution.” (The announcement makes zero mention of mining.) Auradine/Velaura reportedly hopes to sell off its current inventory of ASICs, and whatever it can’t unload will be used for self-mining until the rigs are out of date.
It remains to be seen how many of today’s miners will still be mining for new BTC when the next halving rolls around sometime in April 2028. That event will see the block reward fall to just 1.5625 BTC. If the token isn’t trading significantly above its current fiat price, the economics of mining will completely fall apart, raising questions about who will process BTC transactions and maintain network security.
Cango, BitFuFu glad to bid 2025 buh-bye
Mining’s dodgy economics were on full display in the Q4/FY25 financial results released earlier this month by Cango (NYSE: CANG), which showed a net loss of $291.7 million for the final three months of last year and a $572.4 million loss for the year as a whole.
The loss came despite Cango’s 2025 revenue rising more than sevenfold year-on-year to $688 million, although the comparison is apples-to-oranges, as Cango didn’t start mining until November 2024.
Meanwhile, the report’s red ink was blamed on impairment charges on outdated ASIC rigs and the steep plunge in BTC’s fiat price in Q4. Cango has since sold off more than half its BTC in order to fund its AI ambitions.
Cango CEO Paul Yu hailed the company’s first full year as a miner but was keen to focus on “our evolution into a global AI infrastructure company … With initial site retrofits underway and products in development, we are well positioned to execute with focus and strategic discipline in the new era.”
BitFuFu (NASDAQ: FUFU) fared only slightly better last year, booking a net loss of $57.4 million after reporting a $54 million profit in 2024. Revenue was up only modestly year-on-year (+2.7% to $475.8 million) while expenses soared, driven mainly by ASIC impairment charges and the falling value of BitFuFu’s BTC treasury.
The company noted that its average cost to mine a single BTC increased from $47,496 in 2024 to $77,573 last year, in part due to the halving of block rewards last April and to stiffer hashrate competition. BTC’s price gains over the first nine months of 2025 helped mask those increased costs, but it’s been a different story since October.
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Bitdeer filling the mining void, but for how long?
As miners pivot away from BTC, ASIC manufacturers like Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR) are filling the void, in part because they now have fewer customers for their mining rigs. Bitdeer’s February production numbers saw it mine 705 BTC, up from 668 in January and seriously up from the 110 it produced in February 2025.
Bitdeer’s hashrate has undergone similarly outsized gains, with its self-mining stats hitting 68 EH/s in February compared with 63.2 EH/s in January and just 9.0 EH/s in February 2025. With former hashrate leader MARA now distracted by the shiny thing that is AI, Bitdeer is the clear hashrate champion.
However, much like MARA, Bitdeer isn’t holding onto its BTC, reporting just 51 tokens in its treasury at the end of February. That’s down from 1,530 at the end of January, and from over 2,000 last New Year’s Eve.
Seems Bitdeer has its own AI ambitions to fund, which led to a recent $375 million debt raise ($75 million higher than originally planned). Chief business officer Matt Kong said AI/colocation “represents the most significant long-term value creation opportunity in our portfolio.” The company is “advancing active negotiations with prospective colocation clients” and expects to “execute a significant lease agreement very soon.”
That said, Bitdeer is still in the ASIC-making business, and earlier this month it made good on its pledge to expand beyond BTC by launching the SEALMINER DL1 Air. The new rig is optimized for the Scrypt algorithm and supports “a range of coins,” including DOGE and LTC.
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ABTC movin’ on up the BTC treasury list
MARA’s BTC selloff pushed it down one notch to #3 on the list of the biggest BTC treasury firms, although its remaining 38,689 tokens still make it the list’s top mining operator. Rival Riot Platforms (NASDAQ: RIOT) remains well back in second place with 18,005 tokens.
Sixth-highest among mining operators (#16 overall) is American Bitcoin Corp (NASDAQ: ABTC) with 6,899 BTC. ABTC is the Trump family’s mining operation that was spun off from Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT) last year. (While Hut 8 now focuses on AI, its legacy stack of 13,696 BTC ranks #9 on the treasury list.)
ABTC co-founder/chief strategy officer Eric Trump celebrated the company’s rise up the treasury ranks by tweeting that “no company is climbing the ladder faster.” Unlike most miners, ABTC appears determined not to sell any of its BTC, with the company itself tweeting that its objective is to “accumulate more Bitcoin… faster than anyone in this space.”
ABTC recently celebrated its “ability to mine Bitcoin at a discounted rate,” which it attributes in part to its ability to secure energy at a price below what many of its rivals pay. Having President Trump’s son as a co-founder undoubtedly helps when negotiating energy deals, particularly in red states like Texas, but it may be that ABTC’s sweetheart deals on ASIC rigs are the real cost advantage here.
Earlier this month, ABTC announced a dramatic expansion in the number of rigs under its control. The announcement didn’t disclose the source of these rigs, but they almost certainly came from Bitmain, the Chinese firm that dominates the ASIC market. Proving once again that the Trump name has its advantages, Bitmain previously agreed to provide ABTC with rigs without expecting payment for two years.
Bitmain remains somewhat controversial in Washington, with some Republican pols suggesting the company might be a security risk due to the theoretical possibility that a major concentration of Bitmain ASICs could pose a threat to the American power grid.
Last week, Bloomberg resurfaced these concerns in a deep dive on Bitmain, including the possibility that a Department of Homeland Security investigation of the firm launched under the Biden administration may be ongoing.
Despite ABTC’s Trump ties, plus its access to cheap electricity and Bitmain’s generous deal terms, the company’s share price has struggled as BTC’s price swooned. ABTC shares peaked in September at around $9.30 but shed about $2 from that price before BTC’s price abruptly tanked in October. ABTC closed Thursday at $0.91 (-7.1%), having lost over 46% of its value since the year began.
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Solo mining, whether you like it or not
Whatever their connections, publicly listed miners must really gnash their teeth when they see the occasional story of some mining hobbyist who manages to buck the odds and claim the block reward. The most recent example came a month ago, resulting in a $200,000 payday for a $75 investment in rented hashpower. (Reminder: people do win lotteries, but you likely won’t.)
Hobbyist miners ruled the roost in Bitcoin’s early days, and some still pine for the days when the block reward was 50 tokens and a Raspberry Pi was sufficient to be competitive. Solo mining products like NerdMiner cater to these nostalgia freaks and those who want to add a little geekdom to their lottery fantasies.
The latest to arrive is the BlockChance Bitcoin Ticket Miner, a tiny (2.8” display) device that costs around $50 (reduced from $150), supplies 1,000 KH/s of hashing power, and offers a 0.0056% chance of winning a block. Built on NMMiner firmware and running on WiFi, it requires significantly less juice than your average Antminer, so your utility bill will likely be unaffected, just like your net worth.
While undeniably lacking in aesthetic qualities, it’s a guaranteed conversation starter when you host your next party, and it’s only slightly more unsightly than the usual tchotchke. Plus it offers live updates on all the network activity detailing the utter impossibility of your big payday, so what are you waiting for?
Then again, maybe you’re already mining and you just don’t know it. Digital security firm Securonix reported this week on an ongoing phishing campaign that deploys malware featuring “a multi-purpose toolkit that combines credential theft, data exfiltration, and Monero cryptocurrency mining for maximum monetization.”
Mining malware based on the Monero privacy coin has been around for years, so if your system’s fans suddenly power up for no reason, maybe it’s time to take a closer look under the hood to see what gremlins might have gotten inside.
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Source: https://coingeek.com/this-is-fine-btc-miners-losing-money-selling-tokens-pivoting-to-ai/