BTC miners cheer network difficulty decline, jeer token price decline

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Block reward miners celebrated a significant reduction in the BTC network’s difficulty rate, but the even greater tumble in the BTC token’s price continues to undermine confidence in their long-term future.

• Difficulty falls but BTC price fails to recover
• Cango sells more than half its BTC, MARA needs a loan
• IREN Q4 results
• CleanSpark Q4
• Canaan Q4
• Bitdeer rules January production tallies

The BTC network’s mining difficulty rate fell by over 11% this weekend, the sixth consecutive downward adjustment and the 10th largest in the network’s history. The current difficulty rate of 125.86 trillion hashes required to ‘find’ a new block on the chain is at a low not seen since last July, while the percentage drop is the largest since China lowered its ban-hammer on miners in 2021.

Multiple factors contributed to the difficulty plunge, including last month’s winter storm that forced many miners to curtail operations to preserve strained electricity grids. There’s also the ongoing ‘miner capitulation’ as operators ‘pivot’ to more predictable revenue by serving as data centers for AI and other high-performance computing (HPC) operations.

But the biggest culprit remains BTC’s negative price trajectory. Last week saw BTC struggling to stay above US$60,000, less than half its all-time high set just last October, and testing lows not seen since before Donald Trump was elected U.S. president for the second time in November 2024.

And while the usual suspects quickly opened their wallets to prop up BTC’s price, their panic buys can’t mask the growing retail disinterest in the overall ‘crypto’ sector. Meanwhile, as of Tuesday evening, the average all-in cost of mining a single BTC stood at $84,300, about $15,000 higher than BTC’s current price.

BTC’s hash price index—what miners can expect to earn from their hashing power—has similarly rebounded from last week’s all-time lows, but only just, and remains near lows not seen in years. And as older ASIC models become unprofitable to operate, the number of miners cutting their losses and permanently switching off will only grow.

Last week, the miner formerly known as Bitfarms (NASDAQ: BITF) announced its rebrand as Keel Infrastructure to emphasize that “we are no longer a Bitcoin company, we are an infrastructure-first owner and developer for HPC/AI data centers across North America.”

Bitfarms/Keel is also ‘redomiciling’ from Canada to the U.S. to “expand our access to new sources of capital, increase our eligibility for index inclusion, and simplify our story for U.S. investors.” The announcement prompted a rebound in Bitfarms’ share price, suggesting the ‘no mining here’ declaration was a necessary scraping of some lingering crap off the company’s shoes.

Similarly, Bit Digital (NASDAQ: BTBT), which began its pivot from mining to AI last summer, enjoyed its own share price rebound after celebrating its full exit from “businesses that no longer align with durable value creation.” The company said mining “was effective in an earlier business strategy, but over time it became a less efficient use of capital relative to opportunities that allow for active participation, yield generation, and operational leverage.”

(Ironically, Bit Digital chose to become a digital asset treasury firm stockpiling Ethereum’s ETH token, which has fallen even harder than BTC and is currently ~60% off its nearly $5,000 peak last August. But at least ETH can be employed as part of that network’s proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, allowing Bit Digital to earn yet more ETH that will soon be worth less than it is now.)

And sometimes, the cards are just stacked against you. On February 2, mining operator NFN8 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing “market disruption following the April 2024 Bitcoin halving, costly litigation, and a catastrophic fire at a primary facility that reduced mining capacity by 50%.”

Sell! Sell! Sell!

Another negative signal for mining’s long-term future was last week’s announcement by Cango (NYSE: CANG) that it would henceforth “selectively sell a portion of newly mined Bitcoin to support the expansion of our inference platform and other near-term growth initiatives.” That announcement was accompanied by the revelation that Cango sold 550 BTC in January, breaking its previous vow to continually build up its BTC treasury.

Cango went much further this week, announcing that it had sold 4,451 BTC over the weekend, raising $305 million that it used to “partially repay a Bitcoin-collateralized loan.” The sale reduced Cango’s BTC treasury to 3,645 tokens, less than half the 7,528 it held at the end of 2025.

While Cango said it “remains committed to its mining operations,” the BTC sales are intended to “strengthen its balance sheet and reduce financial leverage, which provides increased capacity to fund the Company’s strategic expansion into AI compute infrastructure.”

Cango has appointed former Zoom exec Jack Jin as CTO of its AI operations, which will be conducted under the banner of EcoHash Technology, a new wholly owned Texas-based subsidiary.

Cango’s token sale cut its ranking on the list of largest BTC treasuries from 15 to 26. The number two spot—and the top-ranked miner overall—is held by MARA (NASDAQ: MARA) with 53,250 tokens. However, last week MARA was spotted moving over 1,300 tokens to a number of trading desks and crypto lenders, including Bitgo, Galaxy Digital, and Two Prime.

Those transfers followed MARA moving over 807 tokens in a pair of transfers to prime brokerage FalconX and market-maker Wintermute. Meaning MARA is no longer content to sit on its tokens and wait for ‘number go up’ (or stop going down) when it needs additional cash to build out its own AI operations.

MARA’s Q3 earnings report showed roughly one-third of its then 52,850 BTC were “loaned, actively managed and pledged as collateral” as of September 30, 2025. A significant portion of MARA’s BTC treasury was purchased on the open market, not mined, and at significantly higher prices than those tokens are worth today.

MARA CEO Fred Thiel hasn’t tweeted (barring one January retweet) since the year began, but he has sold 108,200 MARA shares for just over $1 million in the past two weeks.

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IREN’s Q4 details transition away from mining

As further evidence of mining’s reduced importance in the fortunes of many mining stalwarts, consider that the recent earnings call of IREN (NASDAQ: IREN) didn’t feature a single question about the company’s mining ops. When you consider that IREN was publicly celebrating being the top-producing miner as recently as last July, that’s quite the pivot indeed.

Looking closer at IREN’s fiscal Q2 report, the company reported revenue of $184.7 million in the three months ending December 31, a significant retreat from Q1’s $240.3 million. The culprit was reduced mining revenue, which fell over 28% to $167.4 million, while AI Cloud Services revenue more than doubled to $17.3 million.

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CleanSpark says mining remains foundational but won’t spend to grow it

CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CLSK) reported revenue rising 11.6% year-on-year to $181.2 million in its fiscal Q1, although that figure fell 19% from the three months ending September 30. CleanSpark booked a Q1 net loss of nearly $379 million thanks to “challenging Bitcoin price action” and its negative impact on CleanSpark’s treasury of nearly 13,100 tokens (as of December 31).

CleanSpark CEO Matt Schultz insisted that “Bitcoin mining remains foundational to our business” despite the company’s ongoing efforts to build out its AI/HPC infrastructure. Schultz said mining “continues to provide us with a strategic advantage and power acquisition. That advantage is now translating directly into differentiated positioning in AI infrastructure.”

Schultz claimed CleanSpark’s assets “are being pulled into the AI market, not pushed,” describing the division of authority thusly: “Bitcoin mining funds the platform. AI monetizes it, and digital asset management optimizes it across all cycles.”

On CleanSpark’s analyst call, CFO Gary Vecchiarelli was asked whether CleanSpark would continue to HODL its BTC amid the token’s downward spiral. Vecchiarelli said that while the option to sell is always there, “that’s not something we’re planning on doing even at these levels.” However, CleanSpark will continue to sell “nearly 100% of our monthly operating production” as part of its ongoing ‘hedging’ strategy.

Asked how much of CleanSpark’s ASIC fleet is still profitable at BTC’s current price, Schultz said that, at a hash price of $30, “less than 10% of our fleet” is in the red.

But while CleanSpark continues to express faith in mining, “we don’t plan on spending a significant portion of our cash on mining, unless economics change. We need to keep in mind that we are about two years off to the next halving [which will see the block reward reduced to just 1.5625 tokens]. And in any cycle, as you get closer to halving that ROI window closes rapidly. And right now, [expanding mining ops] doesn’t make sense.”

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Canaan’s revenue up, losses up, share price down

Our final quarterly report comes from Canaan Inc. (NASDAQ: CAN), which saw revenue more than double year-on-year to $196.3 million in the final three months of 2025. That represents its highest level in three years, but the company still booked an operating loss of $23.6 million and a net loss of $85 million, more than triple Q3’s net loss.

Around $21.5 million of that loss was due to the decline in the value of Canaan’s digital asset treasury, which held 1,750 BTC and 3,950 ETH by the end of last year.

Mining revenue hit $30.4 million in Q4, a $200,000 retreat from Q3, which the company blamed on BTC’s price crash. But mining costs were $37 million, nearly $3 million higher than Q3, “mainly due to the increase in deployed computing power.” Canaan also wrote down $12.1 million in rig depreciation during the quarter.

Canaan earns the bulk of its revenue from selling its own ASIC rigs. This ‘products’ revenue hit $165 million in Q4, up 39% from the same period last year, thanks to “the timely execution of a landmark order for over 50,000 A15 Pro mining machines, which was fully delivered by early January 2026.”

It remains to be seen whether Canaan’s timing/luck will hold. Some other ASIC makers, including the dominant manufacturer Bitmain, were recently forced to slash the price of their rigs due to miners switching off ASICs and embracing AI-focused GPUs. Other manufacturers like Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR)—which issues its Q4 figures later this week—have resorted to ramping up their own self-mining operations due to an excess of product they can’t sell.

Canaan CEO Nangeng Zhang called 2025 “a transformative year,” but Canaan is “taking decisive steps to evolve beyond a traditional hardware provider.” Zhang believes mining and AI/HPC “can share infrastructure and grid resources,” and Canaan views “the convergence of computing and energy infrastructure as a compelling long-term opportunity and [we] are aligning our strategy to capture that growth.”

All well and good, but the company has more immediate concerns. Last month, Canaan received a warning from the Nasdaq market because Canaan’s share price had traded below the minimum $1 benchmark for 30 consecutive days. Canaan was given until July 13 to push its share price above that $1 level for 10 consecutive business days or face delisting.

But Canaan’s shares have only sunk further since that warning, dragged down by BTC’s anchor. After bottoming out at $0.50 last week, the shares briefly bumped up to $0.60 on Monday but shed nearly 7% on Tuesday to close at $0.56.

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January’s tale of the tape

Riot Platforms (NASDAQ: RIOT) is no longer reporting its monthly BTC production figures, leaving just six publicly traded miners willing to go on the record regarding January’s output. As always, or for however long these remaining six feel up to it, the figures below are listed in descending order of magnitude.

• Bitdeer retained its spot atop this totem pole by mining 668 BTC in January, up from 636 in December (and up from just 126 in January 2025, before Bitdeer started taking self-mining seriously). Self-mining hashrate continues to climb, hitting a new high of 63.2 EH/s last month, eight points better than December. Bitdeer now boasts 232,000 self-owned rigs under management, 21,000 more than in December, while its hosted rig count remains unchanged at 82,000. Bitdeer says it will continue to deploy new (unsold) ASICs while also retiring “third-party, older-generation rigs.” Bitdeer is also prepping the release of the company’s first DOGE/LTC ASIC (Sealminer-DL1) during the current quarter. Bitdeer’s treasury held 1,530 BTC as of January 31, nearly 500 fewer than it held as of December 31.
• CleanSpark reported mining 573 BTC last month, down from 622 in December, as average operating hashrate dipped 4.6 points to 42.6 EH/s due to January’s storms. CleanSpark sold 158.6 BTC last month, leaving it with 13,513 as of January 31.
• Cango (NYSE: CANG) saw its January production fall to 496.3 from 569 the month before. Average operating hashrate fell 6.3 points to 37 EH/s due to the aforementioned weather issues.
• Hive Digital (TSXV: HIVE) mined 297 BTC in January, a slight retreat from December’s 306, but a slight improvement on November’s 290. Hashrate averaged 22.2 EH/s, one point below December. Hive also realized $7.4 million “through the cashless exercises of 480 BTC tied to its 2025 Bitcoin pledge.” Basically, Hive pledged over $200 million worth of BTC to its ASIC supplier Bitmain to help boost its hashrate to 25 EH/s, a plan Hive claims is allowing it to “scale the business, increase revenue and mining margin” without taking on new debt or issuing new equity.
• BitFuFu (NASDAQ: FUFU) collected a total of 229 BTC in January, a significant improvement from December’s 188, as hashrate rose 3.5 points to 29.6 EH/s. January’s self-mining total was up by seven to 46 BTC, while cloud mining production shot up 32 tokens to 183 BTC. BitFuFu’s BTC treasury grew by 16 to 1,796, and CEO Leo Lu said, despite the recent price volatility, “we remain confident in Bitcoin’s long-term value and will continue expanding both our mining capacity and Bitcoin holdings.”
• Finally, Canaan opened 2026 with a total of 83 BTC, three fewer than December’s total. Month-end operating hashrate fell by 1 point to 6.6 EH/s, while deployed hashrate topped 10 EH/s, suggesting plenty of room for improvement once the weather improves.

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