Bitcoin: Miners Miss the Rally, Canaan Is the Exception

Bitcoin has gained around 22% since August 17, but its publicly traded miners have failed to keep pace. Of the eleven mining or mining-related companies tracked by The Block, only one has outperformed BTC: Canaan. For the others, the median return is barely 1.8%. Meanwhile, exchange stocks and stablecoin-related companies are tracking much more closely with Bitcoin’s rally.

Bitcoin gains 22% as miners fall behind

The contrast is striking compared with previous market phases, when mining stocks almost mechanically amplified Bitcoin’s moves.

Since the start of the latest acceleration, BTC is up around 22%. Exchange companies such as Coinbase, Bullish and Robinhood, as well as stablecoin companies Circle and Figure, have tracked the rally much more closely.

Bref Crypto noted just a few days ago that Bitcoin was returning to the center of publicly traded companies’ strategies, with Canaan, American Bitcoin and Cango among the stocks that had risen sharply.

Over a slightly different period, however, the picture is less flattering. Canaan is the only mining company tracked by The Block to outperform Bitcoin.

Core Scientific is underperforming BTC by around 27 percentage points. TeraWulf trails by 24 points.

The market is therefore increasingly distinguishing Bitcoin from the companies that produce it.

AI is now blurring miners’ profiles

Why the divergence?

Part of the explanation lies in data centers.

For several quarters now, many miners have been using their land, power connections and infrastructure to host computing workloads for artificial intelligence and HPC, or high-performance computing.

Bref Crypto recently explained that AI is now attracting Bitcoin miners’ best power sites.

TeraWulf perfectly illustrates this transformation. In the second quarter of 2026, the company generated just $12.8 million from mining, compared with $31.9 million from its HPC contracts.

HPC now accounts for around 71% of its quarterly revenue, according to the official results filed with the SEC.

Riot is moving in the same direction. Bref Crypto notably reported on its $9.1 billion AI contract linked to Anthropic.

In other words, buying a mining stock no longer necessarily amounts to taking an amplified position on Bitcoin.

Some companies are gradually becoming energy and computing infrastructure groups.

Exchanges and stablecoins capture more of the rally

This shift also helps explain why exchanges and stablecoins are tracking the market more closely.

When Bitcoin rises, more activity can return to platforms: trading, derivatives, conversions and institutional flows. Stablecoins simultaneously serve as settlement currency and a liquidity reserve.

Bref Crypto had already noted that 40% to 46% of ERC-20 stablecoins had been held on exchanges since the end of 2024.

Miners face a different equation. The BTC price matters, of course, but so do network difficulty, hashrate, electricity costs, investment in ASICs and now the billions required to convert certain sites into AI data centers.

That is the paradox.

Diversification into artificial intelligence had allowed several miners to become less dependent on Bitcoin cycles. When BTC begins to rise sharply again, that diversification can also prevent their stocks from immediately matching the rally’s full amplitude.

For now, Canaan remains the exception among the companies tracked by The Block.

Bitcoin, meanwhile, is not waiting for its miners.