VanEck: Bitcoin (BTC) Must Average $100,000 to April 2028 Halving for Miner Breakeven

The $100,000 Average-Price Condition

For a single Antminer S21 XP to break even before the next halving, the Bitcoin (BTC) price would need to average roughly $100,000 from the date of the calculation through April 2028, under a model presented on Wednesday by Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets research at VanEck. The figure is a condition rather than a forecast: it describes the average level at which one unit of the machine covers its purchase cost and its electricity bills by the time the halving arrives, the scheduled event that cuts the block reward paid to miners in half. Sigel was explicit that the requirement is an average, not a touch. A day spent at $100,000, or a brief spike through the level, would not by itself recover the hardware. The model fixes its inputs. Sigel priced one Antminer S21 XP, Bitmain's current-generation unit, at $3,459, set electricity at $0.08 per kilowatt-hour, and spread the equipment cost over a three-year depreciation schedule. He also assumed the total network hashrate, the combined computing power devoted to Bitcoin mining, holds near its recent level at about 1,038 EH/s, close to the record. That assumption matters because the network runs on proof-of-work: every machine added raises the total hashrate and shrinks each individual unit's expected share of new Bitcoin (BTC) issued per block. With hashrate near its peak, each S21 XP earns a thinner slice of the reward, which pushes the price needed for breakeven upward. Under the settings Sigel chose, that price is $100,000 on average until April 2028. The breakeven covers cost recovery alone, leaving no margin for profit or for the overhead of running a fleet rather than a single unit.

A second, stricter threshold sits behind the first. To recover the $3,459 equipment outlay in net cash by the end of 2028, rather than through depreciation on paper, the coin would need to average about $116,000, Sigel calculated. The gap between the two figures is $16,000, and it turns on accounting treatment: the lower condition counts the hardware as covered once its cost is written down over three years, while the cash standard counts only money actually returned to the operator. The cash standard also carries the longer deadline, the end of 2028, against the breakeven window that closes with the halving expected in April 2028. On the lower standard, the question the model answers is narrow: whether the machine pays for itself before the reward it earns per block is cut. Sigel stressed that the result is not fixed. A cheaper machine, a lower electricity rate or a network hashrate that grows more slowly than assumed would each move the breakeven, and the figures describe only the conditions he set. Every input he published is stated outright: the rig's $3,459 price, the $0.08 per kilowatt-hour power assumption and the three-year write-down period, so an operator facing different terms can rerun the arithmetic line by line. Equipment prices move, power contracts differ between sites, and the hashrate itself is a market outcome: the calculation holds only while each of these stays where Sigel placed it. The calculation is also specific to one device on one power contract, and it stands apart from earlier published work on the price levels needed to offset declining mining revenue, which rested on a different basis of equipment, electricity and time horizon. Neither number is a call on where the market is heading; the model prices the economics of one machine, not the direction of the coin.

The $16,000 Spread

The two Sigel figures read as a spread, not a pair of forecasts. The $16,000 distance between $100,000 and $116,000 is the price of financing: an operator who must see cash back in hand, not a written-down asset, needs roughly 16% more price to justify new hardware. That hurdle lands on a sector already under revenue pressure; listed miners sold 48,900 Bitcoin in a record first half, a pattern consistent with balance-sheet defense rather than fleet expansion. The condition the model leaves unmeasured is hashrate itself. Sigel holds the Bitcoin (BTC) network near its 1,038 EH/s record, but nothing in the calculation says how much further capacity can climb before April 2028, and every increment above that level lifts both thresholds higher.