Bitcoin Miners Lag Far Behind Bitcoin’s 22% Rally as Exchanges and Stablecoin Issuers Pull Ahead

Bitcoin is up roughly 22% since August 17. If you owned the coin itself, that’s a good six weeks. If you owned shares in the companies that mine it, it barely registered.

• Bitcoin’s rally since August 17: approximately +22%
• Median return across publicly traded Bitcoin mining stocks over the same stretch: just +1.8%
• Core Scientific: underperformed Bitcoin’s move by roughly 27 percentage points
• TeraWulf: underperformed Bitcoin’s move by roughly 24 percentage points
• Canaan (CAN), a bitcoin mining rig manufacturer rather than an operator: the lone miner-linked stock to outperform Bitcoin over the period
• Exchanges and stablecoin issuers: broadly outperformed the miner cohort over the same window, tracking closer to Bitcoin’s own gains

The gap is wide enough that it’s worth asking why a sector whose entire business model depends on Bitcoin’s price is failing to move with it. Part of the answer sits in the stocks’ own recent history rather than in bitcoin’s price action at all. Several major miners spent the last year pivoting hard into high-performance computing and AI data center infrastructure — leasing power capacity, retrofitting facilities, and signing long-term hosting contracts with AI companies instead of dedicating that same electricity to mining new coins. That diversification was sold to investors as a hedge against mining economics getting squeezed by rising network difficulty and shrinking block subsidies. In the middle of a Bitcoin rally, though, it means a chunk of these companies’ revenue and forward guidance is now tied to the AI infrastructure cycle rather than Bitcoin’s spot price — diluting the direct correlation that used to make miner stocks trade like leveraged Bitcoin bets.

There’s a second, more structural piece to it as well. Public miners have also been steady net sellers of the coin they produce, funding operations and expansion by converting freshly mined Bitcoin into cash rather than holding it on the balance sheet the way corporate treasury companies do. That selling pressure doesn’t disappear just because the broader market is rallying — if anything, a higher Bitcoin price gives miners more dollars per coin sold, which can mean more selling in absolute terms even as the stock price lags behind.

Exchanges and stablecoin issuers face neither of these drags. Their revenue scales more directly with trading volume and transaction activity, both of which tend to pick up during a rally rather than compete with it for capital and attention. For investors treating mining stocks as a straightforward proxy for Bitcoin exposure, the past few weeks are a reminder that the correlation has been loosening — and that a company’s operational strategy can matter as much as the price of the asset it was built around.

Mining stocks and other Bitcoin-adjacent equities do not move in lockstep with Bitcoin’s price and carry business-specific risks. This is not investment advice. To understand how Bitcoin mining economics actually work, see Coin680’s Bitcoin Academy.