Headline: Roughly 20% of Bitcoin miners are unprofitable — and it’s fueling a wave of BTC sales
About one in five Bitcoin miners are now running at a loss, a single statistic that helps explain the flurry of selling from publicly traded mining firms in early 2026.
Key metrics
- Hashprice (daily revenue per unit of hashpower) has fallen since July 2025 and is currently about $33 per PH/s/day, per Hashrate Index.
- Many older rigs need roughly $35 per PH/s/day to break even, so even a seemingly small gap is pushing large swaths of the industry into the red.
- In Q1 2026, major public miners including Marathon Digital (MARA), CleanSpark, Riot, Cango, Core Scientific and Bitdeer sold a combined >32,000 BTC, TheEnergyMag reports — more than they sold across all of 2025 and well above the previous quarterly record (~20,000 BTC in Q2 2022).
- Miner-held BTC has been steadily declining since 2023: CryptoQuant shows miner reserves fell from over 1.86 million BTC at the end of 2023 to about 1.8 million BTC today.
Why miners are selling
Three forces are compressing miner economics:
1) A rising network hashrate, making competition tougher.
2) The recent halving, which reduced block rewards and miner revenue.
3) Broader macro and market pressure that have kept Bitcoin prices muted.
Together these factors have tightened margins — and for higher-cost operators, the pressure can be existential. CoinShares’ Q1 2026 Bitcoin Mining Report warns that higher-cost miners should expect continued capitulation in the first half of the year unless Bitcoin stages a meaningful price recovery.
Who’s buying
While miners unload, corporate treasuries are quietly accumulating. MicroStrategy — the largest corporate Bitcoin treasury — has continued to add to its position. Co-founder Michael Saylor recently shared the company’s purchase history chart on Twitter, a signal followers often read as a near-certain precursor to another buy.
Bottom line
Falling hashprice, persistent network growth and a post-halving revenue squeeze have turned a meaningful slice of the mining sector unprofitable, triggering record sales from public miners and a slow drain of miner-held BTC. The outlook now hinges on whether Bitcoin’s price rebounds enough to restore margins, or whether selling and consolidation among higher-cost operators accelerate further.
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