Listed Miners Sold 48,900 Bitcoin (BTC) in Record First Half

Needham's Half-Year Tally

Listed miners sold 48,900 coins in the first half of 2026, the largest half-year total on record, according to a tally by Needham analyst John Todaro. The selling comes as the Bitcoin (BTC) price last trades at $77,226, up 0.24% over the past 24 hours. The figure aggregates the entire listed cohort, and no company-level split of the 48,900 coins was disclosed, but it documents a sector converting its balance sheets at speed. Public markets have repriced the transition: the CoinShares Bitcoin (BTC) Mining and Digital Power ETF, a listed vehicle holding miners alongside AI cloud and data center operators, has fallen 23% this year after gaining 72% in 2025. Because the fund mixes both business models, its decline cannot be read as a verdict on Bitcoin itself, though the selling does reshape Bitcoin supply at the margin.

Ben Gagnon, chief executive of Keel Infrastructure, framed the sector's dilemma in a Tuesday interview: “We left Bitcoin and found a market more volatile than Bitcoin.” The economics driving the shift are structural. Bitcoin halving events cut block rewards roughly every four years, and each one compresses crypto mining margins until operators consolidate or diversify. Converting existing sites into AI data centers looks cheaper than building from scratch, since the power supply and cooling equipment are already in place, yet the work still demands construction capital and, before any revenue arrives, signed customer contracts. Todaro said companies are telling him funding for AI facility expansion has grown harder to secure, and he expects listed miners to sell more Bitcoin (BTC) in the second half of 2026 and early 2027. The last cycle's playbook, in which operators competed to build holdings as a de facto strategic Bitcoin reserve, has run in reverse.

From Bitfarms to Keel Infrastructure

Keel Infrastructure, the company formerly known as Bitfarms, has traveled furthest down the conversion path. It stopped United States Bitcoin mining on June 29, 2026, to concentrate on AI data center development. Gagnon said in the same Tuesday interview that no new data center customer contract has been signed yet and that three data centers should start producing revenue from 2027. Until tenants commit, every month of construction spending is carried without an offsetting stream, and one widely circulated estimate puts the AI infrastructure buildout across listed miners at about $50 billion.

CoreWeave supplies both the template and the warning. The company began in Ethereum mining, converted into an AI cloud provider, and its stock has still fallen 25% since the start of the year. CleanSpark took a hybrid route, continuing to mine while it builds data centers. Its September operating materials put holdings at 13,530 Bitcoin (BTC) as of September 30, of which 3,475 coins were pledged as collateral in derivatives trades or held against receivables, roughly a quarter of the total. The encumbered share matters for anyone modeling how many coins CleanSpark could actually sell into the market. The stash is worth more than $1 billion, and the stock is down 19% year to date.

Chief executive Matt Schultz separated the two balance-sheet roles outright: the company plans no large new mining investments, treats the operation mainly as a way to secure power at scale, and manages its holdings as capital assets. That posture stands against buyers elsewhere in the market, where Strive's Bitcoin (BTC) holdings reached 43,124 after another weekly purchase. The gap between the two approaches is now the sector's clearest dividing line: some balance sheets shed coins to fund construction, others keep adding to them.

Downtrend, Fear and the Next Sales

The selling arrives into a market already leaning defensive. Fear and Greed sentiment reads 34 out of 100, and our composite scoring puts the strongest resistance at $77,996, scored 100 out of 100, with support at $75,028 scored 89. The spot mark, $77,226, sits between the two, inside a downtrend. Positioning data shows open interest at $16.13 billion and a long/short account ratio of 2.42, so leveraged accounts still lean long even as miners trim spot exposure. Supply elsewhere has been quieter: our tracking of dormant Bitcoin wallets recorded $167.56 million moved in October, a second consecutive monthly drop. If Todaro's forecast of heavier second-half sales plays out, the bearish Bitcoin technical analysis backdrop would absorb that supply first. The mark stands at $77,226, and the near-term test is whether it can take the $77,996 ceiling.