Twelve months after the fourth halving cut the block subsidy from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC, the miner sell-off that analysts widely expected never fully materialized. On-chain data tracked by firms including Glassnode has shown miner outflows to exchanges remaining structurally lower in 2025 and into 2026 than in the equivalent post-halving window after 2020.
The most straightforward explanation is also the most overlooked: the largest publicly listed miners - Marathon Digital, Riot Platforms, CleanSpark - built substantial BTC treasuries through 2023 and early 2024, specifically to avoid being forced sellers after the subsidy cut. When price cooperated and rose through late 2024, their balance sheets looked comfortable enough that discretionary selling could stay discretionary.
What changed structurally is that mining has become a two-tier industry. The industrial-scale operators with access to capital markets can afford to hold. Smaller, private miners with thinner margins and no equity float cannot. The halving accelerated consolidation rather than triggering a liquidation wave - several mid-tier operations were acquired or shut down in Q3 and Q4 2024 rather than dumping coins into the market.
The Fee Side of the Equation
Transaction fees have also played a more stabilizing role than they did post-2020. The Runes protocol, launched on the Bitcoin network at the halving block in April 2024, created sustained fee demand that wasn’t present in prior cycles. Average fees per block have been meaningfully higher in the 15 months since the halving than in the equivalent post-2020 stretch. That’s not a coincidence either - it’s the network behaving as designed, with fee revenue gradually absorbing a larger share of miner income.
The long-term question Bitcoin miners face isn’t whether they can survive this halving. Most of the ones still operating clearly can. It’s whether fee revenue will scale fast enough to support the security budget when the subsidy eventually approaches zero - a problem that remains genuinely unsolved, and that no amount of treasury management changes.
What the Data Doesn’t Settle
Lower miner selling pressure is a supply-side tailwind, but it doesn’t tell you where price goes. It removes one source of overhead; it doesn’t create demand. Institutional buyers - spot ETF inflows, corporate treasury purchases - are still doing the heavier lifting on that side, and their appetite has been inconsistent in 2026.
The halving worked as a supply shock. The rest depends on things the protocol doesn’t control.