Public Bitcoin Miners Sell Record 32,000 BTC in Q1 2026

Publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies sold more than 32,000 BTC in the first quarter of 2026, marking a quarterly record and surpassing their total net sales for all of 2025, according to industry data compiled from company disclosures.

The divestment, driven by tightening profitability margins, involved major operators such as Marathon Digital Holdings, CleanSpark, Riot Platforms, Cango, Core Scientific, and Bitdeer. This figure exceeds the roughly 20,000 BTC liquidated during the second quarter of 2022, a period of market turmoil following the Terra-Luna collapse. Just over a year earlier, these same companies had ended 2024 by adding nearly 17,600 BTC to their reserves, pushing combined holdings above 100,000 BTC. The sharp reversal underscores the sector's vulnerability to shifting economics, even as Bitcoin's price remains above its previous cycle peak, trading recently around 73,000 before pulling back.

At the heart of the selloff is a slump in hashprice, a key metric measuring expected revenue per unit of computing power, which has hovered near 33 dollars per petahash per second per day. This level falls below the estimated 35-dollar breakeven threshold for many...