Bitcoin miners miss the rally as exchanges and stablecoin firms pull ahead

Bitcoin’s comeback from the mid-August has divided the entire cryptocurrency trading into top performers and underperformers. Since August 17, Bitcoin increased by almost 22%. The exchanges and stablecoin-linked companies have followed suit but it cannot be said the same for miners.

The September 9 Data & Insights analysis by The Block showed that, out of all mining companies, Canaan is the only one that is performing better than Bitcoin. The other 10 miners and those working close to it are delivering average median results of 1.8% profit, leaving their performance 20.2 percentage points behind Bitcoin’s 22% gain.

The gap is larger than it seems. According to a Cryptopolitan calculation, the average miner has managed to capture a mere 8.2% of Bitcoin’s upside due to its 1.8% return while Bitcoin gained by 22%. For investors who previously considered miners as a leveraged option in Bitcoin, this relationship has clearly become weaker.

Where the divide is widest

Among the major underperformers are the miners who are very keen on AI and high-performance computing. Core Scientific and TeraWulf lagged behind Bitcoin’s performance by 27% and 24%, respectively.

This transition is changing the way that miners are valued in the market. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Visible Alpha estimates, HPC is projected to contribute around 71% of revenues in 2026 at IREN and Core Scientific and 70% of revenues at TeraWulf.

However, AI brings in different risks. According to a late-July crypto stock rally report from CNBC, Cipher Mining dropped 8%, Riot Platforms fell by 5%, and MARA Holdings dropped by 3% despite the gains for Coinbase, BitGo, and Figure. According to Compass Point analyst Michael Donovan, funding AI build-outs will require financing without significant dilution and costly debt.

The economics behind the lag

Mining economics improved in August, but they are still nowhere near the levels that would be considered acceptable.

According to Luxor’s August Hashrate Lookback, the Bitcoin price rose by 24.5% in August while the USD hash price increased by 24.4% from $31.63 to $39.33 per PH/s/day.

The problem is that it all started from a very low point. The average hash price in August stood at just $34.63, which is still 32% below the monthly average for 2025 — $50.68. Transaction fees accounted for only 0.70% of block rewards, making it the 14th month in a row that block rewards failed to exceed 1%.

And even the futures market doesn’t promise any quick improvements in the mining business. Luxor’s contracts for September to February, when averaged, show a hash price of $36.98, still about 27% below the 2025 average.

Therefore, even if Bitcoin remains buoyant, miners are still in need of some help in the form of fee payments, network difficulty or lower power prices in order to improve their margins.

Selling a different product

Exchanges and stablecoin issuers have one advantage miners increasingly lack: they can make money from activity that does not depend directly on producing Bitcoin.

Coinbase said that 88% of Q2 net revenue came from outside Bitcoin spot trading. Its crypto trading-volume market share reached a record 10.3%, while average USDC held across its products reached $20 billion.

CEO Brian Armstrong put the shift simply: “Coinbase is no longer a bet just on the price of Bitcoin.”

Circle reported $73.3 billion of USDC in circulation at the end of Q2, up 19% year over year, alongside $701 million in total revenue and reserve income.

Miners are trying to diversify in their own way. CoinShares estimated more than $70 billion in cumulative AI and HPC contracts across public miners, with listed operators potentially generating as much as 70% of revenue from AI by year-end. Cryptopolitan has tracked that pivot, including MARA’s $1.5 billion Long Ridge acquisition and IREN’s $3.4 billion NVIDIA cloud contract.

For the wider crypto market, the divergence suggests capital is increasingly rewarding businesses that monetize trading, stablecoins and settlement infrastructure while treating mining as a capital-intensive business carrying both commodity and AI execution risks.

The BIS notes that roughly 98% of stablecoin value is dollar-denominated. As those rails expand, they could deepen crypto’s role in global dollar settlement.

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