Bitcoin miners sell 28,000 BTC worth $2B amid rising costs

Bitcoin miners are selling. Fast. Publicly traded mining companies have offloaded approximately 28,000 BTC in 2026, a liquidation worth around $1.78 billion at current prices, as the gap between what it costs to produce a coin and what the market will pay for it keeps widening.

Their collective reserves have fallen from 127,000 BTC at the start of the year to roughly 99,000 BTC, a drawdown of about 22% in just a few months.

The cost problem is the whole problem

Average production costs for publicly traded miners sit at approximately $74,300 per BTC. With Bitcoin’s price down 27% year-to-date in 2026, a meaningful slice of the industry is running at a loss on every coin it produces. Around 20% of miners are estimated to be operating in the red under current conditions.

The companies driving the bulk of the sales include some of the sector’s biggest names: MARA Holdings, CleanSpark, Riot Platforms, Cango, Core Scientific, and Bitdeer.

Mining difficulty has dropped roughly 18% since its November 2025 peak, which marks the longest sustained difficulty decline on record. In plain terms: the network has gotten easier to mine because weaker operators are shutting off machines and leaving.

Miners are not the only sellers, but they are consistent ones

To put the miner liquidation in context, it is not the largest source of selling pressure on Bitcoin this year. ETF outflows have exceeded $4.4 billion over the same period, dwarfing the $1.78 billion in miner sales by a factor of roughly 2.5.

The AI pivot is reshaping the mining business

Many mining companies are not just selling Bitcoin to survive. They are selling it to fund a transition toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing data center operations.

Mining rigs and AI compute infrastructure share a common dependency: cheap power and purpose-built facilities. Companies that have already built out large-scale data center footprints are finding that renting that capacity to AI workloads can be more predictable and more profitable than mining Bitcoin at a loss.

A company like Core Scientific is increasingly less a Bitcoin miner and more a data center operator that happens to mine some Bitcoin on the side. The BTC sales fund that transformation.

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