Bitcoin Miners Had a $2 Billion Ghost Seller, Citadel Just Cleared It

Bitcoin miner stocks have spent three weeks trading with a seller sitting on top of them. On Friday, Ken Griffin said that seller is nearly finished.

Griffin told Citadel clients the firm has unwound more than 80% of the risk it absorbed from Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness portfolio. The filings behind that book show miner bets that grew in dollars while shrinking to under 10% of the portfolio. The fund was buying miners fast and memory chips faster.

The Seller Nobody Was Watching

Situational Awareness is the artificial intelligence (AI) fund run by former OpenAI researcher Aschenbrenner. It gained 439% in the first half of 2026. Then July arrived.

Leveraged four to one, the fund lost 67% in a single month and handed roughly $10 billion of stock to Citadel on July 30, as BeInCrypto reported when it lost its stock book.

Its last filing before that sale is the one that matters. The 13F, a quarterly holdings report large investors must file with regulators, covered the period to June 30 and was lodged on August 14. It listed a $20.24 billion portfolio across just 26 positions.

Bitcoin miners made up $1.99 billion of it. Core Scientific was the biggest at $666 million. Riot Platforms held $468 million, IREN $433 million and CleanSpark $179 million. A fresh $152 million stake sat in Keel Infrastructure, the company Bitfarms became after rebranding in April.

Those positions grew fast. Miner exposure climbed 79% in a single quarter. Riot alone jumped 229%.

Why the Whole Thing Broke

Aschenbrenner was never buying Bitcoin (BTC). He was buying megawatts. Miners already owned grid capacity, and AI data centers needed it.

The real danger sat elsewhere. In March, the fund held $8.5 billion of put options against Nvidia, Oracle, Broadcom and other AI names. Those were its hedges.

By June 30, they had almost entirely gone. In their place stood $12.5 billion of outright long bets. Sandisk and Micron alone accounted for 55.6% of the whole book.

So the fund stopped hedging and doubled down instead. When chip stocks slid in July, nothing cushioned the fall. Miners were collateral damage in a memory-chip trade.

Griffin Cleared It in Three Weeks

Citadel moved quickly. It pushed through nearly 100 block trades worth more than $4 billion, including the largest intraday blocks of the year in 10 separate names.

“Our ability to distribute this risk was central to our investment thesis,” Reuters reported, citing Ken Griffin in the letter.

Citadel bought the portfolio at a discount, and three Citadel funds gained sharply afterward.

Ken Griffin’s Citadel has already shed more than 80% of the aggregate risk it took on from Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness portfolio.Griffin on the exit:“These included the largest intraday block trades of the year in 10 different names. In the United States, we… pic.twitter.com/v4Ud1sFBys

— Wall St Engine (@wallstengine) August 21, 2026

What Changes for Miner Holders

A large seller with no reason to care about price is now mostly out. That hands the sector back to its own numbers, from hosting deals like Riot’s Anthropic lease to heavy quarterly mining losses.

The tape is helping too. Bitcoin’s 7% daily gain lifted BTC to about $77,309 and its market value to roughly $1.55 trillion.

One question remains. Aschenbrenner loaded up on miners because he believed hashrate was really a claim on power. Citadel has now sold most of it. Whoever bought those blocks made the same bet, quietly, at a lower price.