Bitcoin Miners Shift Strategies: April Saw 70% Increase in Sales

Publicly traded mining companies sold approximately 70% of their mined Bitcoins in April, according to preliminary reports from eight firms mentioned by TheMinerMag.

The publication tracks data from 15 publicly listed companies in the industry, especially following Bitfarms’ acquisition of Stronghold and Bit Digital, Argo, and Terawulf ceasing their monthly operational disclosures.

This shift away from the once-popular HODL strategy among miners became evident in March, with sales volumes reaching their highest levels since October 2024.

Riot Platforms and CleanSpark officially announced their departure from a policy of retaining 100% of mined cryptocurrency. Consequently, by the end of April, Riot liquidated more than 100% of its mined Bitcoins, while CleanSpark sold about 65%.

Only three companies—MARA, Cango, and BitFuFu—managed to retain all their mined coins.

According to BitcoinTreasuries, MARA increased its reserves to 48,237 BTC, second only to Strategy with 555,450 BTC.

Despite moving away from the HODL strategy, Riot and CleanSpark still hold 19,211 BTC and 11,869 BTC, respectively.

Experts largely attribute the miners’ shift to selling to ongoing pressures on profitability driven by network technical parameters. Even with Bitcoin prices rising above $100,000, the hashrate only reached $55 per PH/s per day, significantly lower than the local peak of around $63 seen in December.

Taking into account a 3.34% difficulty adjustment in May, the measure has shown an increase of approximately 8.5% since the beginning of the year.

The hashrate, adjusted to a 7 DMA, has nearly returned to the record level of 925.43 EH/s recorded on April 8.

In April, public miners continued to expand their computational power. MARA’s connected hashrate reached 57.3 EH/s, marking a 5.5% increase over the month.

IREN reported a hashrate of 40 EH/s, up approximately 8%. The company is closing in on second-place competitor CleanSpark, which has a stable hashrate of 42.4 EH/s.

It’s worth noting that some analysts identified a significant discrepancy between Bitcoin’s price dynamics and hashrate as a risk element for network security. In CryptoQuant, the trend was viewed as a sign of strong underlying factors for the leading cryptocurrency.