Miner selling pressure has dropped - and not just because of reduced rewards
Since the April 2024 halving cut the block subsidy from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC, the assumption was that miners would face a brutal squeeze. Revenue halved overnight while electricity costs didn’t. The typical expectation: miners sell aggressively to cover operational expenses, adding persistent downward pressure to the spot market.
That hasn’t really happened.
On-chain data from late 2024 through mid-2026 has consistently shown miner outflows to exchanges running below pre-halving averages. Publicly traded miners including Marathon Digital and CleanSpark have disclosed treasury strategies that prioritize holding BTC rather than liquidating at spot. Marathon, in particular, has not sold mined Bitcoin in several recent reporting periods, funding operations instead through equity raises and debt instruments. This represents a structural shift: mining companies increasingly behave like Bitcoin treasury firms that happen to produce BTC, rather than raw commodity producers with immediate cash needs.
Why this matters for price dynamics
Miner sell pressure has historically been one of the more predictable sources of Bitcoin supply hitting the open market. When that supply doesn’t arrive, the bid/ask dynamic tightens. This doesn’t guarantee price appreciation - demand still has to be there - but it removes a consistent source of sell-side friction that markets spent years pricing in.
Transaction fee revenue has also contributed to the shift. Following the Ordinals-driven fee spikes of 2023 and the continued use of Bitcoin block space for data inscription through 2024–2025, fees have accounted for a meaningfully larger share of miner revenue than they did during the 2020 halving cycle. Miners running efficient operations can survive on a leaner subsidy when fees compensate.
The efficiency gap is widening
Not every miner is positioned the same way. Older-generation ASICs - anything running below roughly 30 joules per terahash - are increasingly uneconomical outside regions with extremely cheap power. The miners who can hold are the ones who secured sub-$0.04/kWh contracts or built out in areas like Texas, Paraguay, or parts of the Middle East. Everyone else is either upgrading hardware or quietly exiting.
What that means longer term for network hashrate distribution isn’t fully settled. Concentration among large, well-capitalized operations continues to grow - and whether that’s a resilience story or a centralization concern depends entirely on what you think Bitcoin’s security model actually requires.