One Block, One Machine

The block was mined at approximately 00:27 UTC through Braiins Solo, a pool designed for solo miners who want to keep the full reward if they find a block. The winning machine hashed at 6.68 terahash per second (TH/s) and drew just 140 watts of power. For context, the Bitcoin network’s implied hashrate at the time was around 1,000 exahash per second (EH/s) or 1 zettahash per second (ZH/s).

The Canaan Avalon Nano 3S retails for roughly $250 to $300. It is compact, quiet at 33 to 40 decibels, and connects via Wi-Fi or Ethernet. Canaan markets it for home use, and it doubles as a space heater in cooler rooms.

The Math Behind the Win

The probability that this specific machine would find any given block works out to approximately 6.72 in a billion, or one in 148,904,370. At 144 blocks mined per day, the daily odds for one such rig were about one in 1.03 million. Running continuously, the expected wait time to find a single block would be around 2,831 years.

The block reward totaled 3.1404 BTC, made up of the 3.125 BTC subsidy plus roughly 0.0154 BTC or $1,137 in transaction fees. At a bitcoin price of approximately $73,800 at the time, the payout landed between $230,000 and $232,000. The coinbase transaction paid out to address bc1qdaqf9ynzwtzjtv5j8h47rfen3vwr7d85hxy8vn.

Small Fleet, One Winner

The miner reportedly operated a small fleet, including two Avalon Mini 3 units and 12 Avalon Nano 3S units totaling roughly 147 TH/s.

At the fleet level, the odds improve to approximately one in 6.7 million per block, with an expected win every 127 years. But pool data and the block announcement credited a single Nano 3S worker at 6.68 TH/s as the machine that found block 951771.

Not the First, Still Rare

Solo home mining wins at this scale are rare. Roughly two dozen or so solo blocks were found in the prior 12 months. In April 2026, a 4.8 TH/s Nerdqaxe++ machine won a block worth around $224,000. Earlier in 2025 and 2026, Bitaxe and Futurebit Apollo miners also found blocks independently.

Several solo and hybrid mining services cater to home miners and hobbyists, including Futurebit Solo, CKPool Solo, Public Pool, Braiins Solo, Parasite, and Nicehash Easymining. Solo, or home-based mining, has experienced a renewed wave of interest and participation.

Why It Matters

Large mining pools and industrial operations control the majority of Bitcoin’s hashpower. A single home miner on a consumer device finding a block does not shift that balance, but it demonstrates that the protocol itself does not weigh outcomes by investment size. The win drew wide attention on Reddit, X, and mining forums, with hobbyists calling it proof that solo bitcoin mining still makes sense as a long shot.

This article first appeared in The Energy Mag. The original article can be viewed here. The Energy Mag (formerly The Miner Mag) provides news, data, and insights on the energy–compute–markets nexus.

The first installment of this Bitcoin-AI convergence series explored a foundational idea: Bitcoin mining was never just about digital currency. It was designed as a long-term energy system, converting electricity into computation.

The second installment examined how modern AI data centers are built on the same physical foundation as Bitcoin mining — chips, power, cooling, and infrastructure working together to turn electricity into compute at an industrial scale.

The third installment further explored how companies position themselves across digital innovation, from asset-light deployment and colocation (a shared infrastructure model) to infrastructure ownership, power integration, and full vertical integration.

Now, that convergence is playing out in real time across the industry.

During the first quarter of 2026, several major publicly traded Bitcoin miners — including Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ), Cipher, and IREN — materially reduced portions of their Bitcoin mining operations, reallocating infrastructure and power capacity toward AI and high-performance computing software, applications, services or capabilities.

This shift was not merely about future positioning. It is already reflected in financial results.

With Bitcoin mining economics under pressure from historically low hashprice levels of mining revenue and rising network competition, AI and HPC infrastructure revenue has emerged as a stabilizing and, in some cases, significantly larger growth driver.

Core Scientific has continued accelerating the conversion of its infrastructure toward high-density colocation for CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV). Cipher has shut down mining operations at portions of its Black Pearl facility after securing a long-term hyperscale AI lease. IREN, meanwhile, has increasingly repositioned itself as an AI cloud infrastructure operator, signing multi-billion-dollar processing and cloud service agreements while scaling back parts of its mining operations.

What has emerged is not simply a temporary diversification trend, but a broader restructuring of the Bitcoin mining industry itself.

The companies that once competed primarily on mining outcomes are increasingly being judged by a broader set of capabilities: infrastructure control, power access, cooling capacity and the ability to serve demand beyond Bitcoin alone.

In other words, Bitcoin mining is evolving from a pure commodity hash business into a broader energy-backed compute infrastructure industry.

This final installment brings together the themes explored throughout this series:

Bitcoin mining as an energy system The shared infrastructure stack between Bitcoin and AI The convergence of Bitcoin and AI business models And the growing importance of energy and infrastructure as strategic assets

The future relevance of Bitcoin mining is no longer defined simply by how much Bitcoin miners produce. It increasingly depends on how effectively operators deploy energy infrastructure across multiple compute markets.

The State of Bitcoin Mining Today

At first glance, Bitcoin mining still appears to revolve around a familiar metric: the rate of computational power and speed to secure blockchain, or hashrate. Even with Bitcoin’s notable price retreat since October 2025, the global Bitcoin network hashrate remains at over 900 EH/s (exahashes per second). For context, that is four times what it was four years ago and is still up around 50% since the Bitcoin halving in 2024.

But beneath that growth, the economics of mining are changing dramatically.

Over the past several years, microchip hardware has become exponentially more efficient. Compared to earlier generations of mining rigs in the past decade, leading-edge machines today are rapidly approaching efficiency levels 900% better.

That evolution has transformed mining into an operational efficiency race. As more efficient machines have come online globally, network competition has accelerated faster than Bitcoin price appreciation, placing sustained pressure on hashprice — the industry’s measure of mining revenue per unit of hashrate.

In earlier cycles, simply deploying more machines often translated into higher profitability. Today, scale alone is no longer enough. The operators gaining market share are increasingly those with access to low-cost power, efficient infrastructure, and disciplined capital allocation.

As a result, mining has also become significantly more capital-intensive, and public miners rely on structured debt, convertible notes, and infrastructure financing to fund expansion. The modern Bitcoin mining industry increasingly resembles infrastructure development as much as technology deployment.

Infrastructure as the Strategic Asset

As AI demand surges globally, the market has begun repricing access to power.

Grid-connected infrastructure — substations, transmission access, industrial campuses, and long-term power contracts — has become scarce and strategically valuable.

Sites originally built for mining are now attracting interest from AI and high-performance computing operators because they already solve one of the hardest problems in the data center buildout: getting large amounts of power to usable compute space.

In many regions, the hardest part of building modern compute infrastructure is no longer constructing the facility itself. It is securing electricity at scale — a problem that Bitcoin miners spent years solving through high-efficiency technology and alternative sources.

As a result, the industry is evolving beyond a pure mining business toward something broader: energy-backed compute infrastructure. This transition is already visible across the sector.

Companies that once focused exclusively on proprietary Bitcoin mining are now expanding into AI colocation, securing direct power-generation assets, and developing flexible compute facilities capable of supporting multiple workloads. The distinction between Bitcoin mining infrastructure and AI infrastructure is becoming less clear.

The Rise of Flexible Compute Infrastructure

One of the defining characteristics of modern mining infrastructure is flexibility.

Unlike traditional industrial facilities built for a single purpose, mining campuses are modular by design. Their core architecture is built around power distribution and high-density compute, making them easier to adapt as workloads evolve.

Those same characteristics make them suitable for AI and high-performance computing workloads. This flexibility matters because demand for AI infrastructure is evolving rapidly. Operators increasingly value infrastructure that can adapt between workloads rather than remain tied to a single application indefinitely.

In many cases, miners can immediately monetize newly secured power capacity through proprietary mining operations while simultaneously retrofitting infrastructure for higher-margin AI or colocation workloads over time. Rather than viewing Bitcoin mining and AI as competing industries, operators see them as complementary layers of the same energy-to-compute economy.

The Future Path

The future relevance of Bitcoin mining may ultimately depend less on the Bitcoin it produces and more on the infrastructure it creates.

Bitcoin remains the foundational economic engine that monetizes energy capacity immediately and globally. But the industry surrounding it is evolving.

The most successful operators so far resemble infrastructure companies, energy developers, and compute platform operators rather than pure Bitcoin producers.

As laid out in the third installment in this series, major industry players are moving toward full vertical integration, owning everything from the power plant to the workload running on top of it. In practice, convergence means a single business model that stretches from electrons to infrastructure to compute revenue.

In this model, Bitcoin mining becomes one layer within a larger energy-backed compute ecosystem. And in many ways, that evolution reflects the industry’s original trajectory all along.

Bitcoin mining was one of the earliest large-scale systems designed around converting electricity directly into digital computation at a global scale. Long before AI infrastructure became the dominant technology narrative, miners were learning how to arbitrage power markets, deploy infrastructure quickly and squeeze more compute from every watt.

The rest of the computing industry is now running into the same problems miners spent a decade solving.

What this series of explainers has described is not a contest between Bitcoin and AI. It is the industrialization of computation, and miners reached this frontier first.

They got there because the economics of mining gave them no other choice: turn cheap power into revenue at scale — or fail.

But these pioneering operators didn’t just survive challenges: they built the infrastructure, the supply chains, and the discipline to monetize it. That’s the position they hold now, as the rest of the industry arrives.

AI is now accelerating the exact same transformation on a far larger scale.

This article first appeared in The Energy Mag. The original article can be viewed here. The Energy Mag (formerly The Miner Mag) provides news, data, and insights on the energy–compute–markets nexus.

This article first appeared in The Energy Mag. The original article can be viewed here. The Energy Mag (formerly The Miner Mag) provides news, data, and insights on the energy–compute–markets nexus.

The company said Tuesday it purchased the remaining 49% equity interest in Project Dorothy 1B from Navitas Global for about $8.8 million, giving Soluna complete ownership of the 25-megawatt facility in Silverton, Texas.

The deal marks the latest step in Soluna’s consolidation of the Dorothy campus after its $53 million acquisition of the Briscoe Wind Farm and the earlier $16.5 million buyout of Project Dorothy 1A.

With the Briscoe wind farm supplying 150 megawatts of owned renewable power and Soluna now controlling 100% of both Dorothy 1A and 1B, the company has assembled what it described as a fully integrated “generation-to-compute” ownership chain across the 50-megawatt Dorothy 1 complex.

Chief Executive John Belizaire said the latest acquisition gives Soluna greater flexibility over how and when the campus transitions toward AI infrastructure.

“Completing the acquisition of Dorothy 1 is an important step in our broader roadmap toward building Dorothy 3 for AI and high-performance computing,” Belizaire said in a statement.

The Dorothy campus currently operates roughly 100 megawatts across three phases. Dorothy 1A is a 25-megawatt bitcoin mining hosting facility, while Dorothy 1B operates 25 megawatts dedicated to proprietary mining. Dorothy 2 contributes another 48 megawatts primarily for hosting operations, where Spring Lane Capital remains an investor.

Earlier this month, Belizaire told TheEnergyMag that Soluna intends to relocate existing mining customers from Dorothy 1A to other facilities within its portfolio as part of a longer-term plan to convert the campus for AI and HPC workloads.

The company has said it is “bifurcating” its operations by separating bitcoin mining and AI infrastructure into different sites, with future bitcoin operations focused more on hosting rather than expanding proprietary hashrate.

Soluna said full ownership of Dorothy 1 is necessary before marketing Dorothy 3, the next phase of the campus, to potential AI tenants. The company is also actively evaluating opportunities related to Dorothy 2 as part of its broader campus strategy.

The transaction was funded entirely with balance sheet cash and closed on May 19.

The move comes as a growing number of bitcoin miners seek to repurpose existing power infrastructure for AI and high-performance computing amid continued pressure on mining profitability. Industry hashprice has remained near historically compressed levels in recent months, pushing operators to pursue more stable, long-duration revenue streams tied to AI workloads.

Soluna’s broader development pipeline now exceeds 4.3 gigawatts, including more than 1 gigawatt across projects in development, construction and operation.

This article first appeared in The Energy Mag. The original article can be viewed here. The Energy Mag (formerly The Miner Mag) provides news, data, and insights on the energy–compute–markets nexus.

Canaan Deploys 920 Avalon A1566HA Miners to Heat 2,800 Homes in Nordic District Network

The project uses Canaan‘s (Nasdaq: CAN) hydro-cooled Avalon A1566HA series units, which produce high-grade hot water at temperatures near 80 degrees Celsius. That heat feeds directly into the customer’s existing district heating infrastructure, replacing traditional heating solutions the provider had previously relied on.

The total deployment spans approximately 8 MW of capacity. An initial 2 MW phase, comprising 228 A1566HA units, is already operating in the region and supplying hot water to local residents. Following that performance, the unnamed Nordic heating provider placed a follow-on order in March 2026 for an additional 6 MW, adding 692 units to the network.

At full capacity, the 8 MW installation is expected to provide reliable heating to roughly 2,800 homes.

Canaan’s CEO Nangeng Zhang said he was personally involved in designing the system’s form factor and led its thermal and deployment optimization. “Heat reuse is no longer an ancillary byproduct of compute,” Zhang remarked in the release. “It is central to building a more efficient, sustainable energy future, and a core part of how we think about system design at Canaan.”

One technical advantage Canaan highlights is the parallel architecture of the A1566HA units. Because each heating node consists of multiple miners operating side by side with dynamic overclocking and underclocking support, the system delivers more consistent output than single-source heating equipment like boilers. That architecture also simplifies maintenance and reduces the risk of supply interruption.

The Nordic region has long led Europe in district heating adoption, where centralized hot water networks serve large portions of urban and rural populations. Governments there regularly incentivize district heating projects because they distribute thermal energy efficiently across wide areas.

Delivering usable high-temperature heat at scale has been a persistent technical problem in the hash-to-heat space. Most compute waste heat tops out at temperatures too low for direct integration into district systems. In the release, Canaan stated that its semiconductor and system design technology addresses that gap, producing output at temperatures that meet district heating standards.

Canaan views the competitive selection as a broader validation of its push into energy-integrated compute infrastructure. The company framed the win as evidence that hash-to-heat solutions are positioned to displace aging fossil fuel-based heating systems, particularly in regions with favorable regulatory conditions.

The Nordic hash-to-heat project marks one of the more concrete examples of bitcoin mining infrastructure being deployed for dual-purpose use, producing both compute output and district-scale thermal energy for residential customers.

Bitcoin Miner Stocks Suffer on Friday, But Still Hold Solid 2026 Gains

Bitcoin closed the week at $77,849, down 11.1% year-to-date. Yet all of the top ten miners today sit well above that figure, and the reasons why go beyond BTC price action. Hut 8 Corp. leads the YTD group (out of the top ten publicly-traded mining stocks by market cap) with a 123.16% gain, trading at $102.52 per share despite sliding 6.26% on Friday.

Bitcoinminingstock.io data shows the company’s market cap stands at $11.54 billion. Hut 8 has been building out artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure under a $7 billion, 15-year lease at its River Bend site, offering GPU-as-a-Service and high-performance compute capacity to enterprise clients.

Terawulf, Inc. follows with a 95.56% YTD gain after dropping 7.03% on the day. Its market cap is $9.17 billion. Terawulf has contracted roughly $12.8 billion in HPC revenue, with deals tied to Google and Fluidstack-backed partners covering more than 200 megawatts of capacity. Applied Digital Corporation posted a 72.38% YTD return but shed 9.50% on Friday, the second-largest single-day loss in the top ten standings.

Riot Platforms, Inc. fell 3.96% on Friday, the third-smallest decline. Its 86.62% YTD gain and $8.94 billion market cap reflect a company that has been selectively offloading bitcoin production while managing its transition to broader compute services. Core Scientific, Inc. dropped just 2.52% on Friday, the smallest single-day decline in the top ten cohort.

The company carries a $7.72 billion market cap and a 66.82% YTD gain. Core Scientific has moved aggressively into AI colocation, anchored by a multi-year contract with Coreweave now valued at approximately $10.2 billion over 12 years. AI revenue already accounts for around 39% of its total revenue mix. MARA Holdings, Inc. posted a 6.39% single-day loss, bringing its price to $12.44. Its 38.53% YTD return still exceeds bitcoin’s performance.

MARA sold more than 20,800 BTC in the first quarter of 2026 alone, using proceeds to retire debt and fund infrastructure expansion. The company was among the largest contributors to a record-breaking quarter in which publicly listed miners sold more than 32,000 BTC combined, surpassing both their full-year 2025 total and the previous single-quarter record set during the 2022 Terra-Luna collapse.

Cleanspark, Inc. fell 5% Friday, trading at $13.28 per share. Its 31.22% YTD return edges above bitcoin’s negative reading. Cleanspark sold portions of its April production, including approximately 748 BTC across spot sales and options, while holding the majority of output. Bitdeer Technologies Group recorded the largest single-day decline in the group, dropping 9.59% to $13.34 a share.

Bitdeer disclosed this week that it held zero bitcoin as of May 15, excluding customer deposits, having mined and sold all 198.3 BTC produced during the period. Its 18.95% YTD gain is the lowest on the list, though it still exceeds bitcoin’s year-to-date return. IREN Limited, ranked first by market cap at $19.14 billion, dropped 8.17% Friday and is down 12.37% over the past five days, the steepest five-day decline out of the top ten.

IREN has committed to a $9.7 billion, five-year deal with Microsoft covering more than 200 megawatts powered by Nvidia GPUs, with a broader pipeline targeting up to five gigawatts in partnership with Nvidia. Cipher Digital Inc. slipped 7.82% on Friday, closing at $20.55 with an $8.4 billion market cap and a 39.19% YTD gain. Cipher has contracted hundreds of megawatts through multi-billion agreements, including deals backed by Google and Fluidstack.

The broader context behind these YTD gains is a rapid and deliberate pivot away from pure bitcoin mining. The 2024 halving cut block rewards to 3.125 BTC while network difficulty continued climbing, pushing an estimated 20% of the industry into operating losses at various points in early 2026. Miners with power infrastructure in place moved quickly to convert megawatts from bitcoin production to AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, which offer longer contract terms and more stable revenue per megawatt.

AI and HPC revenue will likely account for up to 70% of total revenue across listed miners by the end of 2026. Cumulative AI and HPC contracts across the sector now exceed $70 billion. Friday’s session on Wall Street was a uniform pullback across the top ten publicly listed miners. The year-to-date numbers reflect something more durable.

This article first appeared in Miner Weekly, a weekly newsletter by Blocksbridge Consulting curating the latest news in energy, compute, infrastructure, and data analysis from The Energy Mag. The original article can be viewed here.

Bitcoin’s average network hashrate, based on public blockchain data, declined from roughly 985 EH/s in Q4 2025 to 873 EH/s in Q1 2026. Separately, TheEnergyMag compiled quarterly production disclosures from major publicly traded miners to calculate their respective realized hashrate implied from Bitcoin production results.

At first glance, the aggregate change among large public miners appeared relatively modest. The combined realized hashrate of 10 major ones tracked by TheEnergyMag declined only slightly from approximately 297 EH/s in Q4 2025 to 291 EH/s in Q1 2026. HIVE and Cango (NYSE: CANG) were excluded from the comparison because their first-quarter production data was incomplete.

But beneath that seemingly stable aggregate figure was a much more notable redistribution of industrial-scale hashing power.

While companies such as Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ), IREN, Cipher Digital (NASDAQ: CIFR), TeraWulf (NASDAQ: WULF) and Keel Infrastructure (NASDAQ: KEEL) sharply reduced realized hashrate as they dismantled or repurposed mining fleets for AI and HPC infrastructure, others, including Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR), MARA (NASDAQ: MARA) and American Bitcoin (NASDAQ: ABTC) expanded aggressively to absorb part of the displaced network share.

Among the biggest decliners, IREN’s realized hashrate fell from 42.96 EH/s to 35.83 EH/s, while Cipher dropped from 16.55 EH/s to 11.14 EH/s after fully decommissioning mining operations at its Black Pearl facility in February to begin retrofitting the site for HPC infrastructure. Keel Infrastructure, formerly Bitfarms, declined from 16.52 EH/s to 11.51 EH/s as it continued winding down legacy mining operations and shifting toward North American AI infrastructure development.

CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CLSK) witnessed a modest drop but similarly signaled it intends to continue monetizing Bitcoin infrastructure while selectively pursuing AI opportunities. Executives said older ASIC fleets may eventually be sold or relocated once AI deployments become fully operational, though the company acknowledged future site conversions could result in additional impairment charges.

By contrast, Riot Platforms (NASDAQ: RIOT) increased realized hashrate from 34.21 EH/s to 42.29 EH/s during the quarter. Bitdeer climbed from 43.20 EH/s to 50.26 EH/s with energization of its SEALMINERs, while MARA rose from 51.92 EH/s to 55.52 EH/s despite simultaneous expansion efforts of their businesses around AI and HPC initiatives.

The divergence highlighted a growing split within the public mining sector and that shift became especially visible in corporate filings and earnings calls, where several miners disclosed large-scale fleet dismantling efforts, asset write-downs and mining infrastructure impairments tied directly to AI conversions.

Core Scientific said mining operations will continue winding down throughout 2026, with management expecting only one or two sites to remain operational for Bitcoin mining by year-end as the company prioritizes high-density colocation infrastructure for CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV). The company recorded a $266.5 million impairment charge during Q1 2026, including $151.6 million related to mining equipment and $114.9 million tied to mining infrastructure.

Cipher Digital separately disclosed $30.8 million worth of mining rigs classified as held for sale after shutting down Black Pearl mining operations. TeraWulf owned approximately 54,100 Bitcoin miners as of March 31, but only around 35,500 were operational at its Lake Mariner campus. The remaining roughly 18,600 miners were categorized as undergoing maintenance, awaiting disposal, or held on standby to replace units under repair.

Instead of merely idling rigs during periods of weak economics, operators are permanently repurposing substations, cooling systems and data center layouts for AI deployments. Once infrastructure is converted for GPU workloads, it is unlikely to quickly return to Bitcoin mining.

American Bitcoin, one of the few companies still expanding its mining fleet, argued the transition could create a long-term opportunity for dedicated Bitcoin miners willing to continue scaling while competitors unplug fleets.

The company increased its owned fleet capacity from 25 EH/s to 28.1 EH/s in April following the reenergization of its Drumheller site, which had remained offline since 2024. Much of that growth, similar to its 2025 ramp-up, was financed through an unconventional structure that used pledged bitcoin rather than cash to acquire new-generation ASIC miners from Bitmain.

As of March 31, 2026, ABTC had pledged a total of 3,090 bitcoin to Bitmain for the purchase of 18 EH/s computing power, which alone represented nearly 64% of ABTC’s 28.1 EH/s proprietary mining fleet. ABTC mined 817 bitcoin during Q1 2026, up 505% from a year earlier. At the current production pace, and assuming Bitcoin network hashrate remains roughly stable, the company could theoretically mine back the equivalent of its originally pledged bitcoin collateral in about six quarters.

If network hashrate continues declining as industrial miners unplug more hashrate to pivot toward AI infrastructure, ABTC’s payback period in bitcoin terms could accelerate even further as remaining miners capture a larger share of block rewards.

All in all, the ongoing migration has altered the financial logic of industrial mining. During previous downcycles, miners typically unplugged rigs because falling Bitcoin prices or rising energy costs rendered operations uneconomic. In 2026, however, miners are increasingly shutting down fleets because AI infrastructure offers more stable long-duration cash flows, stronger financing conditions and higher expected returns on power capacity.

It will be worth watching how the dynamics play out in the quarters to come. But for now, the system remains balanced.

Surge in Operating Costs

Digital infrastructure company Marathon Holdings attributed a decline in revenue in the first quarter of 2026 to a decrease in the U.S. dollar value of bitcoin during the period. According to a letter to shareholders released May 11, revenue in the quarter reached $174.6 million, a $39.3 million decline from the $213.9 million recorded in the first quarter of 2025.

The letter revealed that an 18% decrease in the average price of bitcoin accounted for $33.1 million of the decline, while $2.5 million was attributed to a reduction in bitcoin production. The remaining $3.7 million was attributed to a drop in other revenue. The losses occurred despite a 33% increase in the hashrate, which rose from 54.3 EH/s in the first quarter of 2025 to 72.2 EH/s.

Reduced revenue, coupled with a surge in operating costs, led Marathon to register a $1.3 billion net loss during the quarter. During the same period last year, the firm recorded a net loss of $533.4 million, or $1.55 per diluted share, meaning overheads increased by $729 million in the first three months of 2026.

“The $729.0 million increase in net loss was primarily driven by a $520.4 million increase in operating loss, largely due to unfavorable bitcoin mark-to-market adjustments of ($1.0 billion) and restructuring costs of $45.9 million during the quarter,” the letter stated.

Marathon’s latest loss-making quarter comes at a pivotal moment for the company as it seeks to reposition itself beyond cryptocurrency mining and into the rapidly expanding artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure market. The shift reflects a broader trend among Bitcoin miners facing tighter margins, higher operating costs, and increasing uncertainty in the post-halving environment.

Meanwhile, besides directing more resources toward AI-supporting data centers, Marathon used its bitcoin holdings to fund the retirement of 30% of its outstanding convertible debt at a discount. The move reportedly reduced leverage, lowered potential future dilution, and improved Marathon’s “ability to allocate capital toward higher-return strategic opportunities.”

“During the quarter, we sold approximately $1.5 billion of bitcoin. These funds were used to repurchase, at a discount, over $1 billion of the face value of our 2030 and 2031 notes, and reduce our line of credit by $200 million,” the letter explained.

Additionally, Marathon refinanced $150 million of its line of credit at a 7% interest rate, down from the 10.5% it previously paid.

Despite diversifying from bitcoin mining, Marathon said reducing its debt by monetizing bitcoin reflects its confidence in the cryptocurrency as an important reserve asset. Consequently, at the end of the quarter, Marathon held 35,303 bitcoin, including 9,995 bitcoin loaned or pledged as collateral. During the first quarter of 2026, it mined 2,247 BTC, bringing the value of its bitcoin holdings to approximately $2.4 billion based on a spot price of $68,222 per bitcoin.

Cleanspark Posts $378M Loss in Q2 as Bitcoin Fair Value Swing Hits Results

Cleanspark’s (Nasdaq: CLSK) Revenue for the quarter came in at $136.4 million, down $45.3 million, or 24.9%, from $181.7 million in the same period a year earlier. The decline reflected bitcoin price dynamics and rising network difficulty despite operational growth across the company’s U.S. mining portfolio.

The net loss was $1.52 per basic share compared to a loss of $0.49 per share in the prior year quarter. Cost of revenues totaled $81.7 million, while depreciation and amortization reached $115.9 million, a figure that climbed with the firm’s ongoing fleet expansion.

Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure that strips out non-cash items including the bitcoin fair value adjustment, came in at negative $241.2 million compared to negative $57.8 million in the year-ago period.

On the balance sheet, Cleanspark held $260.3 million in cash and $925.2 million in bitcoin as of March 31, 2026. That bitcoin figure represents a 14% increase year-over-year. Total assets stood at $2.9 billion, with long-term debt of $1.79 billion and total stockholders’ equity of $986.2 million. The company reported working capital of $1 billion.

Operationally, the miner’s average monthly hashrate increased 18% year-over-year. Megawatts under contract doubled over the same period, including 585 MW of ERCOT-approved capacity in Texas. Cleanspark also secured ERCOT approval for 300 MW in Brazoria and continued leasing progress in Georgia, including construction work in Sandersville.

CEO and Chairman Matt Schultz pointed to four areas of forward progress.

“This quarter, we accelerated our digital infrastructure evolution across four key areas: land and power development, with ERCOT approval of 300 MW in Brazoria; leasing, with further progress in Georgia and beyond; financing, as market conditions remain constructive; and construction, as we continue developing the new parcel in Sandersville,” he said.

Schultz added:

“Our objectives are clear: commercialize our AI/HPC-applicable assets, grow the portfolio, and continue mining efficiently.”

President and CFO Gary Vecchiarelli called the balance sheet a competitive advantage heading into the company’s next phase. He said Cleanspark ended the quarter with enough liquidity to support near-term execution while preserving optionality as artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure demand grows.

The company said it controls more than 1.8 gigawatts of power, land, and data center assets across the United States. Cleanspark release notes that it positions its low-cost energy base as a foundation for both bitcoin mining and potential AI and HPC workloads, with site commercialization initiatives underway.

The company also flagged uncertainty around tariff liability on miners purchased since 2024.

7 Bitcoin Mining Pools Back Stratum V2 as Miners Push for Block Template Control

Antpool, F2pool, Foundry, Spiderpool, Block Inc., MARA Foundation, and DMND are now part of the effort to advance the open mining protocol standard. The announcement was published by Pavlenex on the Stratum V2 Working Group’s official site.

Stratum V2 replaces Stratum V1, a push-based protocol released in 2012 by Marek “Slush” Palatinus that became the industry default but was never designed as a formal standard. V1 left pools in full control of transaction selection, ran in plaintext, and exposed miners to hashrate hijacking and surveillance.

The newer protocol addresses those problems. It uses end-to-end authenticated encryption, cuts bandwidth use by roughly 60% on the pool side and 70% for miners, and introduces a Job Declaration sub-protocol that lets miners build their own block templates instead of accepting what pools assign.

According to the official announcement, “By maintaining Stratum V2 as a public, vendor-neutral specification, we remove compatibility barriers and allow the ecosystem to focus on what matters most: improving efficiency, privacy, security, and miner autonomy, ultimately leading to increased profitability.”

Real-world tests from Braiins show miners can capture up to 7.4% higher profitability through faster template delivery, lower latency, and improved fee selection when running V2 natively.

Antpool CEO Andy Zhou said the company is “proud to support the broader adoption of Stratum V2,” adding that aligning around an open, interoperable standard lets the industry collaborate on efficiency, security, and decentralization. Spiderpool CTO Kenway Wang noted the protocol supports miner-constructed templates, which are especially useful for operators in bandwidth-constrained environments.

Braiins Pool and DMND are already running Stratum V2 in production. DMND launched in 2025 as one of the first pools to offer full miner-selected templates. Blitzpool runs it for solo miners, and the Stratum V2 Reference Implementation community pool continues testing.

The Working Group was founded in 2022 by Braiins and Spiral, Block’s Bitcoin technology arm. The group has operated for more than four years as an independent open-source community and is now entering “a new phase of accelerated development and deployment” with the addition of large-scale operators.

Foundry, Luxor, and Antpool had each made prior testing commitments or prepared infrastructure before this announcement. The seven new additions represent tens of exahashes per second of combined hashrate, a figure that matters because roughly five pools currently control about 70% of global hashpower and therefore most block content.

For individual bitcoin miners, the practical shift depends on when these pools enable V2 access for users. Translation proxies already allow Stratum V1 firmware to connect to V2 pools without requiring hardware or firmware upgrades, which reduces the barrier to adoption.

President Petro Highlights Venezuelan and Paraguayan Potential For Energy Mining

Cryptocurrency mining, as a global activity, has awakened the attention of world leaders, who are offering their takes on what the future of these operations looks like.

Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s controversial leader, took it to social media to reiterate the need for green sources to power these energy-intensive activities.

Petro warned that “if virtual currencies rely on fossil fuels, global warming and climate collapse will erupt.”

Furthermore, he stressed that countries with untapped clean energy, including Venezuela and Paraguay, are attracting bitcoin mining investments. While Paraguay holds the fourth largest hashrate in the world, behind powerhouses like the U.S., Russia, and China, Venezuela is not even in the top 10.

Paraguay has taken advantage of its abundant hydroelectric resources in the Iguazu dam, one of the largest in the world, to offer very competitive energy prices ranging from $0.037 to 0.050/kWh.

Venezuela recently banned bitcoin mining, as its government faces an energy crisis, with demand skyrocketing to a 9-year peak. Even so, reports indicate potential in mining operations near energy generation sources to leverage power that cannot be transported due to a lack of infrastructure.

“ Bitcoin mining is the method by which an individual, using powerful computers, can accumulate Bitcoin through virtual transactions. This could be the case for Santa Marta, Riohacha, and Barranquilla… it represents an immense boost to the development of the Caribbean region,” Petro concluded.

While Hashrate Index’s The State of Bitcoin Mining in Latin America (2026) report highlights mining developments in Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Venezuela, and El Salvador, it does not mention Colombia. This means the country is virgin territory for bitcoin mining, and the nation still lacks the conditions for the industry to develop.