Public bitcoin miners sold more than 32,000 BTC in the first quarter of 2026, already topping the total net sales recorded across all four quarters of 2025 and setting a new industry record. According to data analyzed by TheEnergyMag, that figure also moved past the roughly 20,000 BTC liquidated in the second quarter of 2022 during the Terra-Luna fallout, even with some first-quarter earnings reports still outstanding.
The scale of the selling says a lot about where the mining business has landed since the 2024 halving. Bitcoin is still trading above the previous cycle’s peak, but the economics underneath mining look far less forgiving. TheEnergyMag said network difficulty is now roughly 10 times higher than it was in 2021, while block rewards have been cut in half and hash price has fallen into the low $30/PH/s range, near all-time lows.
At those levels, margins are either compressed or outright negative for operators running older fleets or paying higher power costs.
That pressure has pushed a wide range of miners back into selling mode. TheEnergyMag said companies including MARA (NASDAQ: $MARA), CleanSpark (NASDAQ: $CLSK), Riot (NASDAQ: $RIOT), Cango, Core Scientific (NASDAQ: $CORZ), and Bitdeer (NASDAQ: $BTDR) were among those contributing to the first-quarter liquidation wave as operators sold bitcoin to shore up balance sheets, fund operations and manage debt in a financing environment that remains selective and expensive.
More From Cryptoprowl:
At the same time, the record selling does not tell a fully uniform story. American Bitcoin, Hut 8’s proprietary mining carve-out, had built reserves of more than 7,000 BTC by early April while ramping its proprietary hashrate to 28 EH/s. President and interim CFO Matt Prusak said the company’s focus under current conditions is on “quality growth,” not simply chasing the biggest hashrate numbers.
That split may end up being the more useful takeaway than the record itself. Mining is no longer behaving like one broad business model moving in sync.
It is starting to break into very different paths shaped by power economics, balance-sheet flexibility and how much room each operator still has to keep growing without having to sell.
Bitcoin (CRYPTO: $BTC) is currently trading at $74,983 U.S. per digital token.
