mining

Alcoa, the American aluminum company, is about to reach a deal with the Bitcoin mining company NYDIG to sell its idle Massena East aluminum smelter located in New York State, expected to be completed by mid-year.The plant has been idle since 2014 and is equipped with a substation, transmission lines, and high-capacity grid access, making it attractive to Bitcoin mining and data center operators due to the hydroelectric resources provided by the New York Power Authority. Reports indicate that some retired industrial sites in the U.S. are being transformed into Bitcoin mining, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing facilities.

The UK-listed company Quantum Blockchain announced a placement of 142,857,142 new shares at a price of 0.35 pence per share to raise £500,000. In addition, the company announced the establishment of a new Bitcoin mining subsidiary, BlocKeeper, and the new funds will be used to accelerate its AI-driven Bitcoin mining research and development.

The Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin mining company TeraWulf announced that it has completed the previously announced public offering of 54,510,000 shares of common stock, with an offering price of $19 per share, raising a total of $1,035,690,000. Morgan Stanley acted as the lead underwriter for this offering, while Bank of America Securities, Citigroup, TD Cowen, and Wells Fargo Securities served as co-managers.Citizens Capital Markets and Santander Bank acted as sub-underwriters, and Cantor Fitzgerald served as the equity capital markets advisor. TeraWulf plans to use the net proceeds from this offering to pay for a portion of the construction costs of its planned data center campus in Horse Cave, Kentucky, including the full repayment of outstanding amounts under its transitional credit facility, as well as for future site acquisitions and general corporate purposes.

The native companion asset of Bitcoin, DMT-NAT (abbreviated as NAT), has now landed on the Spider Mining Pool. Miners can simultaneously receive NAT rewards while mining BTC in the same block, achieving dual earnings and ushering in an era of dual-layer rewards in the industry.It is reported that NAT shares computing power, blocks, and addresses with BTC, allowing for simultaneous production without additional operations. This asset is produced every 10 minutes in sync with Bitcoin blocks, with approximately 386 million NAT (currently valued at about 38 USD) produced per block, corresponding to a total market value of about 38 million USD. The output will gradually decrease with block height and mining difficulty, and the code is fully open source.When the single block reward reaches 50,000 USD (market value of 50 billion USD), it can cover part of the miners' costs, thereby enhancing the overall network's computing power. Against the backdrop of Bitcoin halving, it injects new momentum for Bitcoin miners.

According to data from TheMinerMag, in the first quarter of 2026, publicly listed Bitcoin mining companies including MARA, CleanSpark, Riot, Cango, Core Scientific, and Bitdeer collectively sold over 32,000 BTC, surpassing the total amount sold throughout last year and even exceeding the sell-off levels triggered by the Terra-Luna collapse in Q2 2022, setting a "new record for a single quarter."The backdrop of this sell-off is the key metric for measuring miner profitability, "hashprice," which has fallen to a historical low of below $35 per PH/s per day, with about 20% of miners already in the red. Asset management firm CoinShares stated in its report: "Unless the BTC price rebounds significantly, high-cost miners will further capitulate in the first half of 2026."

According to The Block, Bitcoin mining company TeraWulf raised $900 million through a stock issuance, and the funds will be used to build AI data centers. After the news was announced, TeraWulf's stock price fell.

According to DL News, the state-owned power company Irkutskenergosbyt in the Irkutsk region of Russia recently discovered over 8,000 suspected illegal cryptocurrency mining sites, which were disguised as chicken coops, greenhouses, forests, paper mills, and abandoned gas stations.Since 2019, the company has filed 2,170 lawsuits against illegal miners, seeking a total compensation of $18.5 million. The courts have ruled fines amounting to about half of that total, and some cases have been settled out of court. Miners often disguise their activities as electric vehicle charging or agricultural electricity use, leading to power losses. In many regions of Russia, to ensure grid stability, licensed industrial mining sites have been shut down, and there are plans to use artificial intelligence tools to trace illegal mining.

According to Fortune, Bitcoin mining pool giant Foundry has officially launched a new mining pool for the privacy coin Zcash.Foundry CEO Mike Colyer stated that this move aims to respond to the growing demand from large institutions for privacy coins. Currently, the mining pool has attracted several institutional miners, with its output accounting for nearly one-third of the newly added Zcash on the entire network.Zcash achieves transaction privacy based on zero-knowledge proof technology while supporting selective disclosure to meet compliance requirements, making it more favored by institutions compared to its competitor Monero.Boosted by this news, the price of Zcash has increased by over 75% in the past 30 days, with a current market capitalization of approximately $6.3 billion. Foundry currently controls about 31% of the global Bitcoin hash rate, making it the largest Bitcoin mining pool operator in the world.

According to Cointelegraph, about two years away from Bitcoin's fifth halving, mining companies are facing a more challenging operating environment than the halving in 2024. At that time, the block reward will drop from 3.125 BTC to 1.5625 BTC, compounded by record-high network hash rates, rising energy costs, and a more cautious capital market, significantly compressing the industry's profit margins.On the balance sheet front, several leading mining companies have begun to actively deleverage. MARA Holdings sold over 15,000 Bitcoins in March to reduce leverage, Riot Platforms sold over 3,700 in the first quarter, Cango sold 2,000 to repay Bitcoin collateralized debt, and Bitdeer's Bitcoin holdings dropped to zero on February 20.Industry insiders generally hold a cautious outlook. Cango's communications head, Juliet Ye, stated, "The middle ground has almost disappeared; operators with scale and diversified layouts can cope, while those lacking these conditions will struggle in the next halving." GoMining CEO Mark Zalan pointed out, "Capital discipline is now more important than maximizing hash power," and new deployment projects must meet stricter return thresholds.In terms of business models, pure block rewards have become "an increasingly thin business," with strong operators moving towards power and data center businesses, exploring additional revenue through grid peak shaving and waste heat utilization. Cango is transitioning to a dual-line model focusing on both computing power and AI workloads, with Ye stating, "The truly important facilities in five years will be those that can do multiple things simultaneously."

According to CoinDesk, amid the ongoing geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and Iran for about six weeks, the Bitcoin market is clearly dividing into two camps: "passive buyers" represented by Strategy and spot ETFs continue to absorb chips, while whales, mining companies, and some sovereign holders are turning to reduce their holdings.The selling side is showing clear signs: whale addresses holding 1,000 to 10,000 BTC have shifted from net buying to significant net selling, with the change in holdings this year moving from approximately +200,000 coins to -188,000 coins; publicly listed mining companies are also concentrating on reducing their holdings under high cost pressure, with weekly sales exceeding 19,000 BTC. Additionally, sovereign holders like Bhutan have reduced their Bitcoin reserves by about 70% since October 2024.Analysis indicates that despite market sentiment once being in an extreme panic zone, Bitcoin prices have remained fluctuating in the range of $65,000 to $73,000, showing that the price "bottom" mainly relies on support from a few institutional buyers. The current market buyer base continues to narrow, and future trends will depend on whether institutional capital inflows can continue and break through key resistance zones.

According to CoinDesk, after selling 70% of its Bitcoin holdings, there are reports that the Kingdom of Bhutan may have stopped or slowed down its Bitcoin mining activities, in stark contrast to the actions of other major institutions and sovereign nations that are increasing their holdings in cryptocurrencies and gold (El Salvador's current Bitcoin holdings have exceeded 7,618 coins).It is reported that due to economic pressure, its hydropower is currently used more for selling electricity to neighboring India rather than for Bitcoin mining. Additionally, the decline in Bitcoin prices, the increase in network difficulty, and halving pressure are all squeezing the profit margins for mining.As of now, the national sovereign wealth fund managing Bhutan's Bitcoin assets, Druk Holding and Investments, has not publicly commented on the status of fund transfers or its mining operations.

NASDAQ-listed company AVAX One Technology (AVX) announced the advancement of its AI infrastructure strategy. The company has signed a FEED plan for a 10MW AI/HPC microgrid data center, located in Alberta, Canada, leveraging the local low-cost natural gas power to create a high-cost-performance, scalable dedicated AI computing facility. The project is designed by BlueFlare and is one of the first AI computing centers in the area.At the same time, the company invested less than $500,000 to purchase 220 Bitmain S21 Pro mining machines, increasing Alberta's computing power from 150 PH/s to over 200 PH/s. This move serves as a transitional cash flow source during the construction period of the AI center, achieving a dual-track layout of "mining + AI computing power" to quickly monetize existing power capacity.

According to monitoring by Lookonchain, the Bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms is suspected of selling another 500 BTC, worth approximately 34.87 million dollars.In the past 5 days, it has deposited a total of 1500 BTC to NYDIG, worth approximately 102.3 million dollars.

According to monitoring by Lookonchain, the crypto mining company MARA transferred 250 BTC (worth approximately 17.37 million USD) again 3 hours ago.Previously, MARA sold 15,133 BTC (1.1 billion USD) between March 4 and March 25.

According to PR Newswire, BTQ Technologies has released a research paper titled "Kardashev Scale Quantum Computing for Bitcoin Mining," which quantifies the physical costs of the entire process of using quantum computing for Bitcoin mining for the first time. The related research points out that the market has long confused two types of quantum threats: one is the attack on Bitcoin's elliptic curve digital signatures (real and urgent), and the other is quantum mining accelerated by Grover's algorithm (theoretically possible but with extremely high practical costs).The BTQ paper argues that to have a substantial impact on consensus, a quantum computing cluster with energy consumption far exceeding the current level of human civilization needs to be built. The study also proposes an open-source resource estimation model, covering key aspects such as reversible double SHA-256 computation, fault-tolerant quantum error correction, and large-scale quantum bit scheduling. The conclusion emphasizes that the more realistic risk facing Bitcoin comes from vulnerabilities in cryptographic signatures, rather than quantum mining capabilities.