Presented by Fractal Bitcoin

Welcome to Mining Wednesday, where Blockspace covers the intersection of bitcoin mining, energy, and AI.

Today, Blockwork’s Senior Report Ben Strack gives us an update on the various YTD returns of bitcoin and bitcoin-adjacent stocks, and what investors think about their outlook amid wider market volatility.

It’s about a 5 minute read.

P.S. Don’t miss the free hashrate forecast report from Blockspace guest contributor Valentin Rousseau at the end of today’s newsletter 👀 

Market Opens

Navigating bitcoin exposures in a volatile market

Markets have clearly been quite volatile in recent weeks — crypto or otherwise.

Zooming out, the S&P 500 was down nearly 8% year to date early Tuesday, and the Nasdaq Composite index has fared worse, dropping 12.6% so far in 2025.

This article is a collaboration with the team behind Forward Guidance, a macro market newsletter by Blockworks. Get Forward Guidance articles directly in your inbox by clicking the image above.

As BTC hovered around $85,000 Tuesday morning, it was similarly down 9% year to date. Gold is up 21% over that span, flaunting the safe-haven status that BTC does not yet widely enjoy.

Shares of Strategy (formerly known as MicroStrategy) have jumped 30% in recent days, putting it into the green in 2025 (+4% since Jan. 1). But perhaps the most renowned crypto stock, Coinbase, remains down about 32% from the start of the year.

Crypto assets and stocks have been in a sort of “air pocket” as reality replaces post-election enthusiasm with the reminder that some of the bigger changes for the space will take time, Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer told me. 

Legislation — on market structure and stablecoins — will be key before institutional investors feel comfortable engaging with the space in earnest, he argued.

“The stock prices of companies like Strategy and Coinbase continue to be heavily influenced by retail investors and hedge funds that are more inclined to trade out of their positions than long-term institutional holders whose mandates often cause them to sit tight during market downturns,” Palmer added.

Blockspace’s Colin Harper, in a piece that appeared in Blockworks’ Forward Guidance newsletter last week, noted how bitcoin mining stocks are not as correlated to BTC as they once were. 

Large miners like Marathon Digital and Core Scientific are down 27% and 52% YTD, respectively. 

Palmer puts miners into two camps: those involved in building/managing AI data centers and the pure-play BTC miners, with both representing emerging technology plays.

“During a sharp downturn, those visions of future upside can be pushed aside as investor horizons shrink and there is more focus on necessities and staples and stocks with attractive dividend yields,” the Benchmark analyst noted.

Dan Weiskopf, co-portfolio manager of the Amplify Transformational Data Sharing ETF (BLOK), acknowledged the “brutal” Q1 for miners. Still, the fund bought into the recent IPO of AI cloud provider CoreWeave. And CleanSpark (down 20% YTD) is BLOK’s fourth-largest holding.

“We do not believe that the AI/datacenter trend is a bubble and would expect a sizable relief to take form when markets lean more towards risk again,” Weiskopf told me. 

Robinhood and Coinbase are BLOK’s second- and third-largest holdings, respectively. Weiskopf called the innovation of these companies exciting — “especially in the context of a friendlier SEC.” 

Cantor Fitzgerald analysts are similarly bullish on COIN. T. Rowe Price portfolio manager Dominic Rizzo has said that while he considers Coinbase to be an industry “linchpin” (and his fund holds the stock), he doesn’t view Strategy or miners the same way.

BLOK’s number one holding? That would be MSTR. After Strategy’s latest bitcoin buy, the company owns 531,644 BTC (acquired for ~$67,556 per coin)

“We think MSTR's growth rate deserves a premium to traditional multiples of book, especially when the book value is so easy to measure,” Weiskopf said. “A lot can happen in the future and this does not mean that we don't trade around our position.”

Perhaps, after reading that, all your crypto investment questions are answered. More likely, you’re still as uncertain as the rest of us.

— Ben Strack

Full Stack Mining Solutions, From Financing to Firmware

BitMine partnered with Luxor and Soluna to build a turnkey mining solution, combining power, procurement, financing & firmware optimization. See how this collaboration helped BitMine triple deployed capacity & lock in predictable revenue

Bitcoin Mining Headlines

Tether to join OCEAN Pool

The world’s largest stablecoin issuer, Tether, will direct some of its hashrate to OCEAN, a mining pool that allows miners to build their own block templates. “As a company committed to financial freedom and open access, we see supporting decentralization in Bitcoin mining as essential to the network’s long-term integrity,” Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said. OCEAN’s total pool hashrate is 6.4 EH/s, up from 4.4 EH/s a month ago - link

Cleanspark launches treasury desk, revises HODL strategy

Cleanspark, a top public bitcoin miner by hashrate, has launched an “institutional grade Bitcoin treasury desk…to support the Company’s risk management and Bitcoin treasury optimization strategy.” Concurrent with this, the miner has increased a credit facility with Coinbase to $200 million, and it announced that it plans to start selling portions of its monthly production to cover costs. - link

'Clean Cloud Act' draft bill targets Bitcoin mining emmissions

Democratic senators Sheldon Whitehouse and John Fetterman have proposed legislation mandating that AI data centers and cryptocurrency mining operations report their energy usage and adhere to emissions limits. Should the bill pass, these entities would need to provide detailed electricity consumption data and comply with region-specific emissions targets, which would decrease by 11% each year until 2035. By that year, all data centers would be required to run entirely on renewable energy. Non-compliant companies would face fines for surpassing their emissions caps. - link

Mining Tweet of the Week