About 20 percent Bitcoin mining is currently loss-making. This single fact explains much of what was happening across the sector in early 2026, as publicly traded miners raced to sell their shares just to keep the lights on.

Profits crushed to the bone

Hashprice – the daily income earned by a miner per unit of computing power – has been dwindling since July 2025. It is currently around $33 per you petash per second per day, according to Hashrate Index data.

The break-even point for many miners, especially those using older machines, is around $35. This gap, as miniature as it looks on paper, puts a gigantic part of the industry in the red.

According to data from the largest listed mining companies – among them MARA, CleanSpark, Riot, Cango, Core Scientific and Bitdeer – a total of over 32,000 BTC was offloaded in the first three months of 2026. Energy storage.

This number eclipses everything the same companies sold in all four quarters of 2025. It also exceeds the previous quarterly record of approximately 20,000 BTC, set in the second quarter of 2022, when the collapse of the Terra-Luna ecosystem sent markets crashing.

Three combined forces led miners to this record: the expanding network hashrate which resulted in increased competition, reduced block rewards after the last halving, and broader economic problems that kept Bitcoin prices under pressure.

Mining reserves have been depleting for years

The sale in the first quarter of 2026 did not come out of nowhere. Data from CryptoQuant shows that the total amount of Bitcoin held by miners worldwide has been dwindling since 2023.

At the end of this year, miners collectively held over 1.86 million BTC. That number has since dropped to about 1.8 million. The trend is ponderous but steady – and record sales in the first quarter may have accelerated it even further.

Asset manager CoinShares warned in its Q1 2026 bitcoin mining report that more problems could be coming. Higher-cost operators should expect further capitulation in the first half of this year, the company said, unless Bitcoin’s price sees a significant rebound.

Think ₿igger. pic.twitter.com/L1yH3n0k7t

— Michael Saylor (@saylor) April 12, 2026

Bond buyers step in as miners retreat

While miners are selling, corporate buyers are moving in the opposite direction. Strategythe largest Bitcoin treasury company in terms of holdings, continues to strengthen its position.

Co-founder Michael Saylor signaled earlier this week that another purchase was in the works by sharing a chart of the company’s BTC acquisition history – a move that his followers began to read as an almost certain signal of an imminent purchase.

Featured image from MetaAI, chart from TradingView