Miner Weekly: Bitcoin Mining’s Toughest Margin Crunch
This article first appeared in Miner Weekly, BlocksBridge Consulting’s weekly newsletter curating the latest news in bitcoin mining and data analysis from TheMinerMag. Subscribe to receive in your inbox once a week.
Bitcoin mining has entered what is effectively the harshest margin environment of all time. What began as a stable third quarter—with hashprice averaging around $55/PH/s—has now deteriorated into a structural low, slipping to $35/PH/s as BTC corrected sharply into November. At this level, profitability stress is no longer theoretical; it’s systemic.
TheMinerMag’s recent Q3 look-back report makes this tension clear: the median total hashcost among major public miners sits around $44/PH/s. That number includes cash-based fleet opex, corporate overhead and financing—meaning even operators with efficient machines and competitive power rates are now navigating break-even economics. To account for diversified business models, corporate and financial hashcosts are estimated by allocating company-wide expenses proportionally based on the proprietary mining segment’s share of total revenue.
This is where cost-per-hash becomes the more revealing metric. With network hashrate hovering near 1.1 ZH/s, cost-per-BTC doesn’t tell the full picture. Hashcost normalizes difficulty swings and, in this downturn, exposes the widening gap between the median miner and the marginal unit of revenue. It’s also why machine paybacks now exceed 1,000 days for the newest generation of equipment—well past the roughly 850-day countdown to the next halving.
Balance sheets are reacting. CleanSpark’s move to fully repay its Coinbase bitcoin-backed credit line—just weeks after raising over $1 billion in convertibles—illustrates how quickly miners are shifting toward de-leveraging and liquidity preservation. That decision didn’t happen in a vacuum; it happened with hashprice at an all-time low and margins compressing across the board.
The Q3 funding landscape reinforces the same picture. Public miners raised roughly $3.5 billion in debt last quarter, the bulk of it through near-zero coupon convertibles, while equity financing added another $1.4 billion. But the tone changed entering Q4: capital is now coming through higher-cost senior secured notes at around 7% with Cipher and Terawulf alone raising close to $5 billion. That puts Q4 on track to be the largest debt-raising quarter in the sector’s history—surpassing even the convertible-heavy wave of Q4 2024.
This raises an uncomfortable question: can HPC and AI revenue scale fast enough to offset both collapsing hashprice and rising debts? Early numbers show growth, but nothing yet close to the magnitude required to carry the sector through multiple quarters of suppressed mining economics. For now, the data points in one direction: the sector is entering a sorting phase.
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Regulation News
- Bitmain Has been Focus of US National Security Probe – Bloomberg
- Bitcoin mining in China rebounds, defying 2021 ban – Reuters
Hardware and Infrastructure News
- Solo bitcoin miner beats 1-in-180-million odds to land $265,000 block – The Block
- Bitcoin Hashprice Falls to Record Low as Network Hashrate Shows Early Signs of Pullback – TheMinerMag
Corporate News
- HIVE Digital Announces At-The-Market Equity Program – Link
- Applied Digital Completes Phase II Ready for Service at Polaris Forge 1, Fully Energizing First 100 MW Building – Link
- CleanSpark Unwinds Coinbase Credit Line as Bitcoin Hashprice Hits All-Time Low – TheMinerMag
Financial News
- JPMorgan upgrades Cipher and CleanSpark, trims MARA and Riot targets in bitcoin miner reset – The Block
