In brief
- Bitcoin broke a new all-time high of a little over $126,000 per coin on Monday.
- However, the stock prices of publicly traded mining companies are rising even faster.
- Investors are flooding into the stock market and alternative assets over worries that currencies worldwide are being debased.
Bitcoin’s price hit new records Monday, as the so-called debasement trade has become more attractive. But Bitcoin mining company stocks rose even quicker, furthering sizable gains seen across the industry in recent weeks.
Top public companies in the mining space—including the Nasdaq-listed HIVE Digital, MARA, and CleanSpark—all shot up on Monday ahead of the closing bell.
HIVE Digital led the pack with a 25% jump to nearly $6 a share by the close of trading, with IREN up more than 14% on the day to $57.75.
MARA finished Monday priced at $21 per share after jumping more than 9%; CleanSpark rose by the same amount and was trading for $17. And Riot Platforms climbed nearly 11% on the day to $21.56.
Mining stocks are also becoming more attractive as companies look to high-powered computing to increase profits. Google last month announced it was backstopping a deal between AI compute company Fluidstack and Bitcoin miner Cipher, giving Google the right to buy a 5.4% stake in Cipher.
“Miners are winning because they’re flexing optionality: power, infrastructure, AI revenue, and leveraged exposure to Bitcoin rallies, all packaged in stocks,” Texas Blockchain Council President Lee Bratcher told Decrypt. “That’s giving them an edge over crypto companies whose exposure is narrower or more operationally constrained.”
Bratcher added that some miners are holding onto their mined BTC rather than selling it, giving them a benefit akin to crypto treasury firms, particularly as Bitcoin continues to rise.
“Investors are increasingly viewing miners not just as Bitcoin proxies, but as owners of scarce infrastructure: power contracts, land, grid access, and cooling capacity,” said Bratcher. “When crypto is hot, that infrastructure becomes more valuable, especially if grid demand becomes tight.”
Bitcoin was recently up a little over 2% over a 24-hour period, according to CoinGecko, after hitting a new all-time high of $126,080 earlier Monday. It had dropped down slightly to $125,191—still a 9.5% jump over the past week.
U.S. investors last week plunged a record amount of investment into Bitcoin ETFs to get exposure to the biggest and oldest digital coin. Crypto investment products received $5.95 billion in fresh cash, with the most amount of money ever hitting Bitcoin funds in a single week: $3.55 billion in total.
A report from European asset manager CoinShares said that the lion’s share of that investment was directed at Bitcoin ETFs trading in the U.S.
Over the past seven days, the ongoing U.S. government shutdown and an expected October interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve has led the price of Bitcoin, gold, and other cryptocurrencies and precious metals to rally.
Experts dub that kind of move the “debasement trade”—when investors try to hedge against weakening currencies and geopolitical headwinds.
The dollar index, which measures the value of the greenback against major world currencies, suffered its worst first half of the year since the early 1970s as President Donald Trump went full steam ahead with his trade war.
Additional reporting by James Rubin
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