The bulls and bears over Bitcoin above $80k are locked in a fierce, high-stakes tug-of-war and standoff!

When retail investors and big players are shouting: the bull market is back—go all-in on BTC, and when Tom Lee @fundstrat publicly declares that this year’s BTC price will reach $150k–$250k, and ETH will hit $9,000–$12,000,
institutions, whales, and miners, however, are above $80,000 and have quietly begun to sell Bitcoin—or are planning to sell Bitcoin—this includes MicroStrategy, the “dead bull” that has kept buying, buying, buying; in the past few days, it has also been very direct that it plans to sell some Bitcoin to repay interest, see Chart 1.
According to ChainCatcher news, monitored by OnchainLens, whale Loracle.hl has closed its TON, BTC, and CL positions, realizing a profit of $3.9 million. In addition, this whale also closed about 96% of its ZEC long positions, and increased its short position of 1,239,834 HYPE tokens (5x leverage) to a value of $53,230,000, see Chart 2.
According to the latest reports, in Q1 2026, US-listed mining companies sold nearly 32,000 BTC, with the scale already exceeding the total for all of 2025. The main reason is that after the halving, mining costs have risen, and some mining rigs are operating around the break-even point. Below are the specific disclosed sell-off figures from mining companies:
1）Bitdeer (Bit Deer) has zero holdings; it sold all 193.8 BTC that week (reported May 10); see Chart 3.
2）Listed mining companies sold more than 32,000 BTC in Q1 (a new quarterly high, including MARA/Riot/CleanSpark, etc., reported May 4);
3）Mining companies have collectively shifted toward AI infrastructure (Riot/MARA/Core Scientific transitioning, reported May 10);
4）On-chain data: MARA continues large-scale BTC selling (13,210 BTC in Q1, May).