The post Bitcoin miners start funding pivot to AI with debt while selling BTC to stay liquid appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Bitcoin miners’ identity is fracturing on four fronts simultaneously: crushed margins, accelerating AI pivots, expanding debt loads, and a treasury sell discipline that no longer holds. CoinShares’ latest mining report shows public miners’ weighted-average cash cost was roughly $79,995 per BTC in the fourth quarter of 2025. The hash price fell to approximately $36-$38 per PH/s/day in the same quarter, then dropped further to around $29 in the first quarter of 2026. The network logged three consecutive negative difficulty adjustments, the first such streak since July 2022. The live hash price currently sits around $32.36/PH/day, with fees at just 0.40% of block rewards, and the six-month forward market average hash price is near $30.42. What miners do under those conditions is where the market structure case begins. Public mining companies collectively hold 121,516 BTC, worth approximately $8.63 billion, making them meaningful marginal sellers, even after losing their status as the dominant public-company treasury class. Several have already moved from holding to selling. MARA changed its strategy in 2025 to permit sales of Bitcoin from operations and expanded that in 2026 to include balance sheet BTC. Riot Platforms sold 1,818 BTC in December 2025 for $161.6 million, Core Scientific sold just over 1,900 BTC in January 2026 for about $175 million, and now holds under 1,000 BTC. Riot separately funded a 200-acre land purchase at Rockdale entirely by selling roughly 1,080 BTC from its balance sheet. That behavior runs counter to a persistent retail assumption that miners hold by default and that large miner treasury balances are structurally bullish. When margins break, miners act like commodity producers managing liquidity, and Treasury policy becomes pro-cyclical, with selling concentrated precisely when BTC is already weak. A line chart tracks Bitcoin hash price falling from roughly $36–$38 in Q4 2025 to $29 in Q1…

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Filed under: News - @ March 26, 2026 10:27 am