Bitcoin miner sales record 32,000 $BTC In the first quarter of 2026, it instead signed a roughly $70 billion deal to help power AI, marking the largest departure from the group in the network’s history.
The breach caused Bitcoin’s hashrate to drop for the first time in six years, but the hashrate recovered to new highs after absorbing the shock and adjusting the difficulty level without missing a single block.
Bitcoin absorbs record miner withdrawals as AI takes away capital
In a post published on X on July 6, analyst Shanaka Anslem Perera claimed that Bitcoin passed one of the biggest real-world tests in history after public mining companies such as MARA, CleanSpark, Riot Platforms, Cango, Core Scientific, and Bitdeer, which were facing shrinking profit margins, sold more than 32,000 coins. $BTC In Q1 2026, it directed its capital toward building AI infrastructure.
For them, this calculation made sense, considering it costs about $80,000 to produce one. $BTCa level below which virtual currency prices have remained for most of this year. Meanwhile, instead of block reward lottery tickets, companies like Microsoft and Google offer multi-year contracts that could potentially earn you three to five times that amount by training AI.
“They did what any business would do,” Perera explained. “$BTC Miners sold more Bitcoin in one quarter than in all of last year, more money than the industry dumped in the entire Terra collapse, and began converting power plants into AI data centers. ”
Now, remember, it has always been said that the security of Bitcoin depends on miners spending real energy to protect it, but with so many people withdrawing in such a short period of time, it felt like the system might crash. And for weeks, the total computing power that protects the Bitcoin network has been wobbling under the influence of hashrate, falling by about 4%, the first decline in six years, ending five consecutive years of double-digit growth.
But Perera said the network did something its critics forgot. At its core is the rule that as miners leave and blocks arrive slower, mining automatically becomes easier and more profitable for users who are still connected.
So when the deserters’ strength waned, the payoff was calculated to go to those who remained and to the civilian operators who rushed in to fill the gap. Although some adjustments brought the difficulty down by 10%, this was one of the biggest drops this year, pushing the hash price over $30 per petahash/second.
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“The network that was supposed to rely on these miners proved to not need them at all,” the market commentator wrote, noting that Bitcoin’s hashrate has recovered to all-time highs without any interruption in production.
The lesson in all this, he said, is Bitcoin’s resilience, absorbing the “single biggest exit for its own miners” caused by opportunities for profit elsewhere, and never failing to produce blocks every 10 minutes as designed.
“The regime has not been weakened by desertion,” Perera concluded. “So I was tested and I passed.”
Minor stress indicators reach historic low zone
Other places Perera celebrated $BTCMr. Garr, a pseudonymous analyst who indicates the staying power of , noted that the Minor Cycle Stress Composite Index, which combines the Puel Multiple and the Inverse Minor Capitalization Index, has fallen to a new low in 2026 and is in historically undervalued territory.
According to the report, similar readings were seen in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024 during periods of severe stress and market bottom for miners, and the lowest possible reading for this indicator was recorded in 2015. $BTC fell nearly 50%, from about $300 to about $160 in less than seven days. According to on-chain engineers, the same pattern is being repeated today.
