Bitcoin has been trading higher since around January 2024, but miners in the US are getting hammered. Their profits are gone. Their stocks are in freefall, their machines are still running, but the business is barely breathing.
And this is all happening under the nose of President Donald Trump, who said on the campaign trail that he’d protect American crypto miners and keep Bitcoin “made in the USA.”
According to data from Bloomberg, the CoinShares Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF has dropped over 50% since its peak in December 2024. That’s way worse than the fall in Bitcoin itself.
The hashrate, which measures how much a miner makes per unit of computing power, is barely hanging above its all-time low. It’s sitting at just $49. The lowest it’s ever been is $36. That’s not even break-even for most companies.
Trump’s trade war crushes mining margins
Trump’s tariffs have made things worse. The machines miners use mostly come from countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Those same countries are now caught in the middle of Trump’s trade war. Importing the gear costs more. Electricity prices are still high. And the hashrate keeps growing because people won’t stop building new rigs, even when nobody’s making real profit.
Paul Prager, the CEO of TeraWulf, said it straight. “Please find me a miner that is genuinely making money given the hashrate,” Paul said. “The issue isn’t just tariffs, it’s that we keep making machines. The hashrate makes it very challenging to mine at a profit. No companies are truly making money mining.”
Bitcoin mining profitability is down. Source: CryptoQuant
It got worse in April 2024, when the Bitcoin halving cut the mining rewards in half. Miners went from earning 6.25 Bitcoins to just 3.125 Bitcoins per block. That drop was massive. At the same time, the network difficulty shot up, and the number of transactions slowed down. The combination has squeezed every miner’s income to the bone.
A miner’s income (called hashprice) comes from four things: how hard the network is, the Bitcoin price, the block reward, and how much in transaction fees they collect. Even with Bitcoin flying, the other three have gotten worse. There’s no safety net anymore.
The CryptoQuant indicator that tracks how hard it is to mine hit a new record high. Miners are solving harder problems for fewer coins. The transaction fees that helped plug the holes last year are also gone. That’s because the buzz around NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain—big in 2023, huge in 2024—has disappeared.
AI pivot fails to save miner stocks
By late 2024, things were looking up, at least for a second. Mining stocks had climbed to multi-year highs. Investors were hyped about Trump’s stance on crypto. Some miners started looking at AI infrastructure as a side hustle.
Companies like Bit Digital, Bitdeer Technologies Group, and Core Scientific all tried moving into high-performance computing (HPC). They hoped to rent their rigs and data centers for artificial intelligence operations.
But nothing panned out. “Since then, mining economics have eroded and negative headlines around AI capex and the proliferation of less-energy intensive AI models like DeepSeek have weighed on certain miners,” said Reginald Smith, who covers fintech and payments at JPMorgan Chase & Co.
John Todaro, an analyst at Needham & Co., said none of the miners pushing AI have managed to sign any big hyperscaler leases. “Sentiment has soured considerably on this front,” John said, “as no miners have been yet able to sign a major hyperscaler lease.” The problem is even bigger than just a lack of deals. Investors have started quitting.
“Many investors we have spoken with are ‘throwing in the towel’ as there is increasing concerns that in order to get a major hyperscaler lease signed, miners will have to partner with a major development company and/or financier which would reduce the miner’s share of the economics notably,” John added.
Some miners are still in the fight, especially the big ones with deep pockets. Reginald said he doesn’t expect the bigger mining operators to disappear any time soon. But he was blunt about the rest. He said he “wouldn’t be surprised to see smaller, capital constrained operators exit.”
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This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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