The combined capitalization of 14 American mining companies fell by 22% in February 2025. According to Coindesk, which cites a JPMorgan report, the shares fell due to a drop in Bitcoin prices, as well as worsening economic indicators in the mining market. This is reported by RBC Crypto.
The investment bank's analysts also paid attention to the shares of Bitcoin (BTC) miners, which use their high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI). Their quotes came under additional pressure due to the release of a new Chinese AI model DeepSeek in late January. According to JPMorgan analysts, this was due to concerns about the demand for data center capacity in the short term.
Mining is a complex computational process of verifying the authenticity of Bitcoin transactions. The process of mining involves confirming blocks of transactions and receiving a reward in the form of new Bitcoins. Those who participate in this process are called miners. They compete with each other to solve complex problems of calculating so-called hashes. For this work, miners receive rewards in Bitcoins.
In 2024, the overall decline in miners' income prompted companies to look for new ways to monetize and technical solutions based on their capacities. One of the options was artificial intelligence (AI) technologies as one of the options for using computing power.
Mining data centers are being adapted to the needs of AI. Why is this profitable? The excitement is caused by the fact that DeepSeek is able to work more efficiently than its American counterparts, including ChatGPT from Sam Altman's OpenAI. It is more efficient and consumes several times less computing resources.
The February report also noted a drop in miner revenue and profitability. JPMorgan calculated that Bitcoin miners earned an average of $54,300 per EH/s (exahash per second, a measure of computing power) in daily Bitcoin mining rewards in February, down 5% from the previous month.
“Gross profit from daily compensation decreased by 9% month-on-month to $29.5 thousand per EH/s in February,” analysts at the investment bank wrote about the performance of American companies.
Hash rate, or hashrate, is a term used to measure the power of devices used to mine cryptocurrency. The indicator determines the number of operations (hashes) per second that mining equipment can produce (H/s). As hashrate values grew, decimal prefixes began to be used: terahash (TH/s), exahash (EH/s), petahash (PH/s), and others.
The report also said that Core Scientific (CORZ) was the best performer, down 9%, while Greenidge Generation was the worst performer, down 36% for the month.
The data on the decline in miner income in February is confirmed by the Hashrate Index metric developed by Luxor, which tracks the expected profitability of miners per unit of power (petahash, PH/s). However, the index showed an even deeper decline than in the bank's February report.
In February, the Hashrate Index fell from $60.42 to $45.9 per TH/s, a 24% drop. And given that the total hashrate of the Bitcoin network was virtually unchanged in February (up 2% to 779 million TH/s, according to Blockchain), the data shows that mining profitability has been hurt by the price of Bitcoin. BTC prices are down about 18% in February, according to Coinglass.
According to the Hashrate Index as of March 5, the decline in mining stock prices in February was part of a longer correction. Since the beginning of the year, all 25 companies tracked have lost between 10% and 54%. BitFuFu suffered the smallest losses, with its shares falling 10%. Soluna Holdings saw the biggest decline, with its shares falling 54%.
Источник: cryptocurrency.tech
