Bitcoin (BTC) is trading roughly 17% below what the average miner spends to produce a single coin, yet operators are not dumping reserves.
Key Points:
- Bitcoin sits near $63,400, well under the industry's estimated average production cost of about $78,000.
- Transaction fees now supply well under 1% of miner revenue, the smallest share since 2015.
- Publicly listed miners sold roughly 28,000 coins this year, largely to fund AI data center expansion.
Bitcoin Mining Costs Outpace Prices
Industry estimates put the average cost of producing one Bitcoin near $78,000, with roughly a fifth of the global fleet running at a loss.
Spot prices have sat below that line for months and hovered near $63,400 this week, leaving weaker operators short on cash. The gap has forced them to switch off older machines and redirect capital elsewhere.
Not every miner sits on the wrong side of that math, since operations with newer rigs and power contracts below five cents per kilowatt-hour still clear positive margins. The industry average blends energy, depreciation and financing costs, so it hides a wide spread between the strongest and weakest companies.
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Miner Selling Pressure Stays Muted
On-chain profitability gauges sit well below their yearly averages, yet outflow data tells a different story. The Puell Multiple, which measures daily miner income against its 365-day average, has hovered near 0.74, well inside the range analysts treat as revenue stress. The Miner Position Index has stayed negative, indicating that operators are holding coins rather than moving them to exchanges.
Fee income offers no cushion either.
Transaction fees accounted for well under 1% of miner revenue this month, the smallest share since 2015, according to Glassnode data. On-chain analyst Axel Adler Jr. argued the network is adjusting in a controlled way, noting Bitcoin has fallen 49% from its October 2025 peak while hashrate slipped only 23%.
Bitcoin Miners Pivot To AI
Where selling has occurred, it has mostly funded a strategic shift. Publicly listed miners offloaded about 28,000 BTC this year, worth roughly $1.78 billion, trimming collective reserves from 127,000 coins to near 99,000. Much of that cash went into data center capacity leased to artificial intelligence tenants, a business that pays in dollars rather than block rewards.
MARA Holdings disclosed sales of 23,093 Bitcoin for about $1.6 billion across the first half, at an average price of $70,631. The company used most of those proceeds to repurchase convertible notes and to back a planned acquisition of gas-fired power capacity in Ohio.
The retrenchment has been building since late last year.
Mining difficulty peaked near 156 trillion in November 2025 and has since fallen more than 19%, one of the deepest sustained declines on record, while public miners sold more than 32,000 coins in the first quarter alone. Each downward adjustment hands the operators who stay online a larger share of the same shrinking reward pool.
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