Bitcoin miners are increasingly selling their mined Bitcoin rewards to maintain liquidity and stay afloat amid rising operational costs and shrinking profit margins in 2025. This trend is driven by a combination of factors including the 2024 Bitcoin halving event, rising energy prices, increasing mining difficulty, and declining transaction fees, all of which have severely compressed miners’ profitability.
Mining Bitcoin involves solving complex cryptographic puzzles with specialized hardware, and miners receive newly minted bitcoins as rewards for successfully adding blocks to the blockchain. However, every four years, the Bitcoin protocol halves the block reward to control supply and create scarcity. The most recent halving in 2024 cut miners’ rewards from 6.25 bitcoins per block to 3.125 bitcoins. This halving effectively halved miners’ revenue while their costs, especially electricity, have increased by about 40 percent, pushing the break-even cost of mining a single Bitcoin to between $90,000 and $100,000[1].
This economic squeeze has forced many miners to sell their Bitcoin holdings to cover operational expenses. Data from October 2025 shows that miners transferred approximately 51,000 BTC, worth over $5.6 billion, to exchanges like Binance within a week, signaling significant sell pressure[2][4]. Such large transfers from miner wallets typically indicate either direct liquidation of Bitcoin to raise cash or preparations for borrowing against their holdings. This behavior marks a shift from earlier in the year when miners were net accumulators, holding onto their Bitcoin in anticipation of price increases following the halving[2].
The profitability crunch is exacerbated by record-high mining difficulty and historically low transaction fees, which have further reduced miners’ revenue streams. The average fee per block in 2025 has been the weakest since Bitcoin’s inception in 2010, adding to the financial strain on miners[2][7]. Many smaller or less efficient mining operations have been forced to shut down or pivot away from traditional mining.
In response to these challenges, many major Bitcoin mining companies, especially in the United States, are diversifying their business models by pivoting toward artificial intelligence (AI) data center hosting. These companies leverage their existing power infrastructure to provide “warm powered shells” for AI workloads, which is currently a bottleneck in AI development. This pivot offers a more stable and potentially lucrative revenue stream compared to the increasingly unprofitable Bitcoin mining business[3][4].
For example, companies like IREN and CleanSpark have announced significant investments and revenue targets related to AI cloud services, with CleanSpark securing $200 million in Bitcoin-backed credit facilities to expand both mining and AI operations[3][4]. Analysts have upgraded price targets for miners embracing AI, reflecting investor confidence in this strategic shift[3].
Despite these adaptations, the fundamental economics of Bitcoin mining remain challenging. The halving mechanism is designed to reduce rewards over time, which, combined with rising costs and network difficulty, forces a continual economic reset. This process weeds out inefficient miners and consolidates the industry around the most cost-effective operators. The expectation is that as supply growth slows and weaker miners exit, Bitcoin’s price will eventually need to rise to restore profitability and balance incentives[1][6].
In summary, Bitcoin miners are indeed selling their rewards in large volumes to stay financially viable in 2025. This selling is a response to halved rewards, rising costs, and declining fees, which have squeezed margins to near break-even or loss levels for many. At the same time, miners are exploring new revenue avenues such as AI hosting to diversify income and reduce reliance on Bitcoin mining alone. This dual strategy of selling Bitcoin to maintain liquidity while pivoting to AI represents the current survival and adaptation approach within the mining industry.