I noticed that in the first quarter of this year, publicly traded Bitcoin miners downloaded an impressive amount of BTC. We're talking about over 32,000 coins sold by companies like MARA, CleanSpark, Riot, Core Scientific, and Bitdeer between January and March. It’s the all-time record for a single quarter, even surpassing the sales in Q2 2022 when the Terra-Luna ecosystem collapsed.

The reason? The hashprice is at historic lows, below $35 per PH/s per day according to Hashrate Index. Currently, we are around $33, which means about 20% of the mining industry is operating at a loss. When energy costs rise and the coin price doesn’t recover, even experienced miners are forced to sell. The total BTC reserve held by miners has decreased from 1.86 million at the end of 2023 to about 1.8 million now.

CoinShares predicts further capitulations among high-cost operators in the first half of 2026 if the price doesn’t rise significantly. Meanwhile, the contrast is stark: while miners sell, treasury companies like MicroStrategy continue to accumulate. Michael Saylor, founder of this company which has become synonymous with an aggressive accumulation strategy, shared this week that they are buying more BTC as the price drops from the $73mila highs reached a few days ago. Two opposing strategies that reflect two completely different views of the current market.