Investing.com has lost more than 10% in less than a week, going from a comfortable position above $66,500 to around $61,300 as the market digests the asset redemption of the now-defunct Mt. Gox exchange.
The Mt. Gox administrator will reportedly begin returning more than 141,900 BTC, valued at around $8.7 billion, to creditors starting in July. Bitcoin hit an all-time high near $74,000 in mid-March, driven by a surge in interest in new spot exchange-traded funds, but its price has since fallen.
“Although it is unclear how much of the distributed BTC will be sold by creditors, we do not expect all or even most of the coins to be sold in the near term,” commented analysts at HC Wainwright. “Many of these early BTC investors have a hodl mentality and very low cost bases.”
Elsewhere, shares of AI-linked bitcoin miners outperformed dedicated miners, rising 11.5% compared to a 1.4% rise for the latter group. This increase follows several announcements, including a $150 million investment by Coatue in Hut 8 Corp (NASDAQ:) through a convertible note to build AI-focused data center infrastructure. Additionally, two other public miners revealed expanded contracts with existing AI clients.
“AI contracts carry high-margin, recurring revenue streams that are not susceptible to BTC price fluctuations,” the analysts noted. “BTC miners are leveraging the capacity of their infrastructure to support AI computing, attracting new technology investors in the process.”
Last Thursday, Nasdaq-listed software company MicroStrategy (NASDAQ 🙂) acquired an additional 11,931 BTC for $786 million, at an average price of around $65,900 per coin. With this latest acquisition, MicroStrategy's total holdings have increased to 226,331 tokens, worth just under $14 billion. The largest corporate holder of bitcoins has invested more than $8.3 billion in the original cryptocurrency since 2020.
In terms of hardware advancements, Bitmain unveiled its latest Antminer S21 series rigs at the World Digital Mining Summit in Las Vegas. The air-cooled S21 XP features 270 TH/s of computing power with an efficiency rating of 13.5 J/TH, a 10% improvement over the S21 Pro. Additionally, Bitmain announced the S21 XP Hydro, a hydrocooled with 473 TH/s and an efficiency rate of 12 J/TH. These new platforms are expected to begin shipping in the fourth quarter of 2024.
“Mining stocks fell a modest 1.3%. The network hash rate fell 1.3% to 574 EH/s, and the network difficulty remained largely unchanged at 83.7T. Hash prices fell 7.2% to $0.05/TH/day due to lower BTC prices,” wrote HC Wainwright.
