1 hour ago
1
The economic climate remains “brutal” for block reward miners on the BTC network, and only a return to last year’s all-time price high seems capable of reversing this trend.
- BTC mining: not for the faint of heart, nor light of wallet
- Cango’s incredibly shrinking BTC treasury
- Bitdeer launch new ASICs, aim for Norway’s largest data center
- Russia’s illegal miners getting creative
- March production numbers
This week’s surge in the BTC token’s fiat price has (for however long it lasts) offered some relief to the network’s beleaguered mining operators. As of mid-Wednesday, the average all-in cost—including the need to periodically replace older ASIC rigs with newer ones to remain competitive—of producing a single BTC was ~$79,500. That’s ~$5,000 higher than what the token is currently worth, but considering that gap has been as high as $20,000 in recent months, miners will take it.
The next network difficulty adjustment will occur on Friday, April 17, and is forecast to drop by nearly 3%, offering struggling miners another lifeline. That would bring the difficulty rate to just under 135 trillion hashes (aka guesses needed to ‘find’ a new block on the network and claim the 3.125 BTC block reward), a low not seen since last September (discounting February’s weather-related difficulty plunge).
But the narrative surrounding BTC mining remains toxic. The first quarter of 2026 saw the network’s hashrate fall 4%, which some blamed on the crisis in Iran, where the government is known to mine. But Bloomberg suggested this week that the falling hashrate could also be due to some miners simply unplugging old ASICs that are no longer profitable to operate, and not replacing them with new ones.
Speaking of, the nation of Bhutan once actively promoted both its BTC treasury and mining operations, but it has now sold 3,247 tokens since the year began, and its treasury has fallen from ~13,000 in late-2024 to just 3,524 today.
As for mining, Arkham data shows that the last time Bhutan’s BTC stack recorded an inflow of over $100,000 was over a year ago, suggesting that the country’s renewable energy mining operations have either dramatically slowed or had their plug pulled.
And of course, there’s the ongoing ‘pivot to AI’ by miners pursuing more reliable revenue streams by serving as data centers for AI and other high-performance computing (HPC) tasks. CoinShares recently estimated that as much as 70% of miners’ revenue could come from AI/HPC streams by the end of the year, up from just 30% when the year began.
Bloomberg analyst Vasu Kasibhotla said this pivot would only accelerate as electricity costs rise. CoinShares analyst Matthew Kimmell concurred, predicting “the end of an era for some large U.S. miners … as they adapt away from models built for a different capital and energy market environment. Margins are just getting really thin, hash price kicking bottoms. It’s brutal out there.”
So brutal that some analysts have begun comparing the economics of mining BTC to the cost of minting new pennies. If you’ll recall, the U.S. government ceased minting pennies last year because it no longer believed “continued production is fiscally responsible or necessary to meet the needs of commerce in the United States.”
It’s now only two years until the next BTC ‘halving’, which will reduce the block reward to a mere 1.5625 tokens. With BTC’s hash price continuing to hover around all-time lows, it remains to be seen how many of today’s miners will follow the lead of the company formerly known as Bitfarms (NASDAQ: BITF) and adopt the “in time, no Bitcoin” mantra.
Cango’s incredibly shrinking BTC treasury
There’s a March mining production chart at the bottom of this article, but it could be the last we publish, as many pivoters have ceased mining entirely, while many of those who continue to mine now decline to report their monthly output. Perhaps they don’t see any value in publicizing their shrinking tallies as they switch rigs off, or maybe they simply no longer wish to associate their brand with a failing technology.
Consider Cango (NYSE: CANG), which issued a March ‘operational update’ that doesn’t actually mention how many BTC it mined last month. Cango did offer details on its operational hashrate (37 EH/s as of March 31) and its ongoing efforts to reduce its average cash cost per coin mined, but nothing about last month’s output by the self-proclaimed “leading Bitcoin miner.”
Cango also casually dropped the news that its BTC treasury drawdown isn’t slowing. Cango sold 2,000 BTC last month, pushing its “robust” treasury down to 1,026 tokens, barely one-eighth of the 7,528 tokens it held at the start of the year.
Cango went into far greater detail, announcing that its AI/HPC offshoot, EcoHash Technology, had launched its official website. Cango has also allocated space at its Georgia mining facility to serve as a “living showroom” for its “standardized, plug-and-play compute modules” for AI/HPC activities.
So far, the AI pivot hasn’t ridden to the rescue of Cango’s share price, which is down over 70% since the year began. Cango was recently threatened with delisting from the NYSE if it can’t push its share price back up over $1 and keep it there. But Cango’s shares closed Wednesday at $0.45, down 2.6% for the day.
In two years, only Bitdeer will still be mining
Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR) is making its own AI pivot and announced this week that its AI cloud business generated $43 million in revenue in March, more than twice February’s total. Clearly a man who enjoys a good pun, chief business officer Matt Kong called the AI revenue “a pivotal milestone” in Bitdeer’s evolution.
On March 30, Bitdeer announced that its Tydal Data Center offshoot had inked a new deal with Norwegian contractor Data Center Installations (DCI). The plan is for DCI to help convert Tydal’s Norwegian mining facility into what Bitdeer believes will be “Norway’s largest operational AI data center and one of the largest in Europe by installed capacity.”
Bitdeer hopes to have the Norwegian facility ready to go by December. Bitdeer’s Kong said this week that the company was “in negotiations with potential tenants” for the facility “and we expect to close these agreements in the near term.”
Bitdeer claimed the mining hashrate crown at the end of last year and has continued to build on this advantage, hitting a proprietary hashrate of nearly 70 EH/s last month, up a staggering 504% year-on-year. Former hashrate leader MARA (NASDAQ: MARA) is now a distant second at around 61.7 EH/s. Bitdeer said this week that it expects its hashrate will “continue to grow for the next several months.”
Bitdeer’s ascent wasn’t exactly planned, as the company also makes ASICs that it’s having a harder time selling to third parties due to the industry-wide AI pivot. Regardless, this month saw Bitdeer launch its new SEALMINER A4 series, including the air-cooled A4 Pro Air (9.45 joules per terahash) and two hydro-cooled A4 Pro Hydro and A4 Ultra Hydro (10.9 J/TH each). Get ‘em while they’re, er, cool.
Russia’s illegal miners getting creative
The U.S. remains the dominant country in global hashrate, with a 37.4% share, according to Hashrate Index’s most recent Global Hashrate Heatmap. That’s more than twice the share of runner-up Russia (16.9%), which is understandable given Russia’s often contradictory attitudes towards mining.
Last month, Russia not only extended its seasonal bans on mining in the Republic of Buryatia and Zabaykalsky Krai, but it also made these bans year-round until 2031. There are now 13 Russian zones (including areas of occupied Ukraine) in which mining is frowned upon, but Russia’s Ministry of Energy recently shot down reports that it was planning to impose similar restrictions in the city of Moscow or the region surrounding it.
Russian state media outlet Tass quoted the ministry’s Electric Power Development Department director Andrey Maksimov saying a mining ban required a local governor sending a request to the government, and Moscow’s governors “haven’t written such appeals.” The ministry estimates there are 46 data centers already operating in the city and another 19 in the surrounding region.
Russia has struggled to convince miners to register their operations so that the government can (a) measure the power miners are drawing off local grids, and (b) collect fees and taxes. Legislation proposing amendments to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation—including stiff fines and prison terms of up to five years for illegal mining—was submitted to the State Duma on March 31.
Estimates of the annual financial losses suffered by both the state (in terms of lost revenue) and energy companies (in terms of stolen power) have ranged from RUB4.7 billion (US$65 million) to four times that sum. What everyone agrees on is that the figure is growing every year, with the Rosseti power company claiming its 2025 illegal mining losses were nearly 4x its 2024 losses.
Barely a week goes by without a report of yet another illegal Russian mining operation being rumbled, and some of the more recent discoveries show how creative these under-the-radar miners are getting.
Last month, Andrei Tsyganov, former deputy head of Moscow’s Butyrka pretrial detention center, sentenced to 34 months of forced labor for running a clandestine mining operation in a utility room in the facility’s psychiatric hospital. Incredibly, Tsyganov was caught making similarly unapproved use of the facility’s power in 2022.
In Irkutsk (one of Russia’s banned regions), the director of the local power company said illegal miners have claimed their excessive power consumption is due to charging electric vehicles, drying wood for building a house, or even heating chicken coops. This week, an illegal mining op was found humming away in an abandoned gas station that hadn’t been disconnected from the grid.
One defendant, whose setup included his own transformer substation, a hangar for mining rigs, and a security team with dogs, tried to claim that the facilities weren’t his; they just happened to be on his land. The courts didn’t buy it and fined him RUB3 million ($40,000).
March or die
Behold what is possibly the final BTC monthly production chart this site will publish, because attendance at these gatherings is getting thinner than the crowds at a J.D. Vance speech. As ever, but now maybe nevermore, the results below are presented in descending order of magnitude.
- Bitdeer reported mining 661 BTC in March, down from 705 in February, as its number of self-owned rigs fell by 7,000 to 225,000. Still, the March token total is up 480% year-on-year, while Bitdeer’s treasury is down to just 31 tokens, 20 fewer than February and 1,499 fewer than at the end of January.
- CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CLSK) came oh-so-close to usurping Bitdeer’s crown by producing 658 BTC in March, a significant gain from February’s 568. Average operating hashrate hit 47.3 EH/s, four points better than February. CleanSpark sold a total of 905 BTC in March but purchased another 445, leaving its treasury at 13,561 at month’s end, up 198 from February. CleanSpark CEO Matt Schultz said the company was making “significant headway toward securing our first hyperscale customer in AI and high-performance computing, while actively building out our talent pipeline to support these high-margin growth initiatives.”
- BitFuFu (NASDAQ: FUFU) produced 214 BTC in March, down slightly from February’s 227 as hashrate dipped half a point to 25.9 EH/s due to the company purging some older ASICs. The production decline was entirely due to the company’s cloud mining customers, who saw their production fall by 19 tokens to 171, while BitFuFu’s self-mined output rose by six to 43. BitFuFu CEO Leo Lu said the company sold 80 BTC last month, reducing its treasury to 1,794, with some of the proceeds earmarked for acquiring “newer, more energy-efficient” rigs.
- Finally, Canaan Inc. (NASDAQ: CAN) produced 89 BTC in March, three more than in February, as its hashrate was largely unchanged at 6.9 EH/s. Canaan’s treasury contained 1,808 BTC (+15) and 3,952 ETH (unchanged) at the end of March. The company’s shares closed Wednesday up 7.5% to $0.55, but that’s still well below the $1 target that Canaan needs to hit by July 13 if it wants to avoid delisting from the exchange. Since the year began, Canaan’s shares have been down 23.5%.
Watch | Teranode Explained: How Teranode Changes Blockchain Scaling
English (US) · 