While Bitcoin is stuck in a range, the mining industry is changing fast. Public miners are selling more BTC, hashrate is falling, AI is pulling capital and infrastructure away from mining, and ASIC prices have collapsed across most efficiency tiers. Yet for the miners that remain, lower competition is quietly improving hashvalue and creating one of the more unusual operating environments of the past five years.
Are Sellers Running Out of Ammo?
Miners Add to Supply Pressure as Treasury Strategies Shift
Hashrate Declines as AI Pivot Accelerates
Downward Hashrate Trend Continues
Lower Competition, Higher Hashvalue
Cheap ASICs Change the Upgrade Equation
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Are Sellers Running Out of Ammo?
Bitcoin has spent four straight weeks trapped between $62K and $66K. Sellers have had plenty of negative headlines to work with like the Coldcard hack, another delay in U.S. regulatory clarity, Strategy selling Bitcoin, and weak ETF demand. Yet price still hasn’t broken lower.
Sellers appear to be losing momentum. At the same time, demand remains too weak to push Bitcoin meaningfully higher. That leaves one key question: what finally breaks the range, or is this flat price action signaling something more fundamental?
More analysts are now calling for a bottom and an end to the bear market in the coming months. Based on the duration of previous cycles, the timing would fit. That doesn’t rule out we will see more volatility first, but it could mean Bitcoin is getting closer to the transition from bear market to broader recovery.
Miners Add to Supply Pressure as Treasury Strategies Shift
Public Bitcoin miners have sold roughly 28,000 BTC this year, worth about $1.78 billion at current prices, as lower Bitcoin prices and rising production costs continue to squeeze margins. According to Blockware Intelligence, publicly listed miners started the year holding a combined 127,000 BTC. That figure has since fallen to around 99,000 BTC.
A large share of that decline came from MARA. The company disclosed that it sold approximately 23,093 BTC during the first half of the year, at an average price of roughly $70,631 per coin. That represents a significant shift in treasury strategy. MARA ended last year with 53,822 BTC, meaning the sales amounted to roughly a third of its year-end holdings. Its treasury now stands at 35,577 BTC, sliding to the fourth place on the corporate Bitcoin treasury leaderboard.
The selling comes as miners face a tougher operating environment and increasingly look beyond Bitcoin mining for growth. MARA has been evaluating a broader move into AI infrastructure, while Riot Platforms has pushed further in that direction through its reported $9 billion Anthropic compute agreement.
Still, the headline number needs context. Spread across the year, 28,000 BTC does not represent overwhelming selling pressure relative to Bitcoin’s daily trading volume. The significance is less about the size of the flow on any given day and more about the change of course. Miners that historically accumulated or held large Bitcoin treasuries are increasingly becoming a steady source of supply.
Hashrate Declines as AI Pivot Accelerates
The shift toward AI and high-performance computing is now starting to show up more clearly in miner hashrate. As several public miners dismantled or repurposed Bitcoin mining fleets, their combined operating hashrate declined meaningfully. Across the group, hashrate fell from roughly 428 EH/s to 403 EH/s year to date.
Bitdeer remained the biggest offset to that decline. Its operating hashrate increased by more than 32% over the past six months, reaching 73.0 EH/s, supported by the continued rollout of its own SEALMINER production pipeline.
MARA, Riot, American Bitcoin and Hive also expanded hashrate capacity, but their additions were not enough to offset reductions at CleanSpark, IREN, Cango, Cipher, Keel, Core Scientific, and TeraWulf.
Keel Infrastructure has taken the transition further than most. During Q2, the company completed the decommissioning of all of its U.S. Bitcoin mining operations in preparation for data center development, while mining continues in Canada during the phased transition.
Downward Hashrate Trend Continues
Network hashrate is down 164 EH/s, or 15.4%, year-to-date, and 227 EH/s, or 20.1%, from its all-time high. It currently sits at roughly 901 EH/s on a 7-day moving average. With publicly traded miners still operating around 403 EH/s, they represent a substantial share of global compute. That means further capacity reductions or continued reallocation of power and infrastructure toward AI, could become increasingly visible at the network level.
Lower Competition, Higher Hashvalue
The near-term impact is lower competition for miners that remain online, which is already improving mining economics through downward difficulty adjustments. Year to date, Bitcoin mining difficulty has fallen 14%, from 148.26T to 127.48T. Over the same period, hashvalue increased from 42.6 sats/TH to 49.5 sats/TH.
That makes 2026 an unusual year compared with the past five. For miners focused on accumulating Bitcoin rather than maximizing short-term fiat returns, the higher hashvalue creates a more attractive environment.
The key to operating successfully in this market is increasingly having other revenue streams that can cover operating expenses. Miners that can fund power, payroll and overhead without selling their production are in a much stronger position to hold onto their Bitcoin particularly if they believe the asset is currently undervalued.
Cheap ASICs Change the Upgrade Equation
Since the start of the year, ASIC prices have fallen sharply across most efficiency tiers. Machines in the 14–19 J/TH range declined 67%, from $15.00/TH to $4.95/TH. The 19–25 J/TH tier fell even further, down 82.8% from $12.30/TH to $2.11/TH. Even the already depressed 25–38 J/TH segment dropped another 66.7%, from $3.06/TH to $1.02/TH.
The only segment that has held up relatively well is the most efficient equipment. ASICs below 14 J/TH declined from $21.15/TH to $18.28/TH, a drop of just 13.5% since March 15, when Hashrate Index began tracking this category separately.
From a capex perspective, that creates an interesting trade-off. Rather than replacing an existing 14–25 J/TH fleet with sub-14 J/TH machines at a significant premium, it may currently make more sense to expand with the heavily discounted efficiency tiers just below the top end.
The key is to invest in power and infrastructure that can support a future upgrade to more efficient machines. This allows miners to take advantage of low ASIC prices today without locking themselves into older equipment long term. Of course, this strategy only works where power costs and other operating expenses remain low enough to keep those machines profitable.
