Public Miners Sell Record Bitcoin as Industry Splits Between Selling and Quality Growth
This article first appeared in Miner
Even if bitcoin falls below that level, Prusak said the company retains the flexibility to allocate capital dynamically. ABTC raised $240 million through at-the-market offerings in 2025 and another $110 million in the first quarter of this year.
“We don’t have to flip into AI. We are a bitcoin allocator. If bitcoin’s expensive relative to the cost to mine, we mine. If bitcoin’s cheap relative to mining, then we buy.” he said, adding: “ At this time, we have no intent ot sell. … We are accumulating.”
But for private operators without comparable access to capital, the divergence in strategy is increasingly shaped by one of the industry’s oldest variables: power costs.
Sean McDonough, president and CEO of New West Data, a Canadian oil producer that mines bitcoin using off-grid power generated by flared natural gas from its own oil sites, said the company’s effective power cost is below $0.02 per kilowatt-hour. That is, in some cases, roughly one-third of what large-scale public miners pay.
At that level, even less efficient machines remain profitable. With hashprice around $30/PH/s, a miner paying $0.02/kWh can sustain fleet efficiencies of roughly 60 J/TH. McDonough said this enables the company to acquire older-generation equipment at lower upfront costs while maintaining margins, especially as ASIC prices have fallen alongside hashprice.
That cost advantage has allowed New West Data to expand despite the downturn. The company tripled both its oil production and bitcoin compute capacity in 2025 and expects to triple again this year. It currently operates about 15 MW of computing capacity, all powered by flared gas from its own sites.
Still, flared gas represents a niche model, requiring expertise in upstream oil production rather than traditional power procurement through utilities or long-term power purchase agreements.
Absent ultra-low-cost power, miner operators are also turning to operational optimization to preserve margins.
Luxor, a bitcoin mining pool operator, ASIC broker, and software provider, launched a fleet management tool called Commander earlier this month. The platform uses automated algorithms to evaluate hashrate and power market conditions every five minutes, dynamically adjusting power settings across a fleet based on real-time economics.
The goal is to optimize output from existing infrastructure. Luxor says internal benchmarks show an 8% to 14% improvement in profitability compared with traditional on/off curtailment strategies.
The shift toward software reflects a broader recalibration across the industry. With hashprice under pressure, upgrading to the latest generation of machines often requires capital outlays that are difficult to justify on a standalone return basis.
Instead, operators are focusing on extracting better margins from existing fleets — gaining incremental efficiency wherever possible.
Ethan Vera, Luxor’s chief operating officer, said the Commander platform has scaled to about 5 EH/s of customer hashrate since launch. It complements LuxorOS, the company’s firmware solution introduced in 2022, which now supports roughly 45 EH/s, or about 5% of the global network.
In one recent case study, Luxor claimed that Soluna, a publicly traded bitcoin miner with colocation and proprietary mining in Texas, was able to speed up the recovery time via LuxorOS for its 1.1 EH/s fleet by 50% after curtailment events, improving uptime without additional operational expenditure.
All told, the industry is no longer moving in lockstep. What was once a relatively uniform business model defined by scale and hashrate growth is fragmenting into a range of survival and quality growth strategies shaped by power economics, balance sheet flexibility, and operational sophistication.
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