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

For today’s newsletter, we go whalespotting. 

It’s about a 3 minute read.

NiceHash has moved to Switzerland, offering institutional miners a secure, compliant, and transparent platform to manage and maximize their mining output– delivering the reliability and performance expected from the best mining pools. 

Institutions own the majority of your favorite bitcoin miner

More than ever, whales are crowding the pool of liquidity for bitcoin mining stocks.

Institutional holdings in public bitcoin miners have accelerated since the last bull run, so much so that 9 out of the 13 largest public bitcoin miners by market cap have 40% or more of their outstanding shares owned by institutions. 

Core Scientific stands out, with a tremendous 85.61% of its stock in the hands of institutions. On the opposite side of the spectrum, BitFuFu’s share of institutional holding is shockingly sparse at 0.39%. Bitdeer, one of the largest stocks in the bunch both in terms of market cap and MWs under management, is lower than we might expect, as well, perhaps indicating that Wall Street has a bias against Chinese-run publicly traded bitcoin miners.

In the chart below, we break down the top 10 institutional holders for 13 bitcoin miners by total shares owned, percentage of outstanding shares owned, and total value of allocation (as of market close on February 18, 2025).

There are a few usual suspects that show up across the board, with BlackRock (which is the ultimate or penultimate institutional holder for all of the stocks it holds except for Core Scientific) and Vanguard having the most allocations of the institutions. Other honorable mentions include Morgan Stanley, State Street, Geode Capital Management, Van Eck, UBS, Invesco, and Vident Advisory.

BlackRock takes the cake for the highest allocation value. Its total portfolio value is a buck shy of $2 billion, whereas Vanguard’s is a close second at $1.8 billion. The third largest allocator in our group, V3 Holdings, notably only holds shares of Cipher Mining, of which it holds 39% of outstanding stock. 

It’s worth noting that some of these allocations provide liquidity for investment vehicles for retail and institutional investors alike. BlackRock and Vanguard, for instance, use their holdings largely for their investment products, namely Blockrock’s ETFs and Vanguard’s index funds. Other institutions, like State Street, may be holding shares in custody for clients, instead of holding them for their own portfolio. 

Regardless, these institutional holdings are a reminder that the market still has an appetite for public bitcoin miners despite the bitcoin ETFs, just as it has appetite for gold and silver miners even with plenty of available precious metals investment vehicles. 

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