Bitcoin Mining Stock Values Rising Faster Than the BTC They Produce: JPMorgan

Publicly traded Bitcoin miners are trading remarkably high compared to the value of the BTC they have left to mine, according to JP Morgan.

In a Tuesday report, the banking giant compared the recent performance of 14 industry leaders on their hash rate and BTC production, while also assessing their dominance over the mining landscape at large.

“The aggregate market cap of the 14 U.S.-listed Bitcoin miners we track increased 29% ($6.4 billion) from June 30th to $28.3 billion as of July 15th,” wrote JP Morgan analyst Reginald L. Smith.

Among those firms, Cipher Mining (CIFR) performed best with a 44% rise, while the worst performer Stronghold Digital (SDIG) fell by 8%. Aside from the latter, every miner in the group outperformed BTC over the last two weeks, which itself rose by 6%.

Since miners earn their revenue directly in BTC, their earnings and stock performance are joined at the hip with the digital currency. That said, other miner-specific factors can affect their operations, including energy efficiency, competition from other miners, and the quadrennial Bitcoin halving, which cuts the pace at which miners produce new BTC in half.

Since the latest halving on April 19, Bitcoin’s total hash rate is still down by about 60 exahashes per second (EH/s). Hash rate serves as a proxy for industry competition and mining difficulty, with a drop indicating that some miners have jumped ship.

That bunch wouldn’t seem to include public miners, however, who JP Morgan says “added a combined 17 EH/s of capacity in June”—the highest monthly addition ever. This puts public miners’ cumulative hash rate at a record 157 EH/s, or about 26.6% of the global network hash rate, “which is encouraging and speaks to the efficiency of public operators.”

The greater large miners’ share of the total hash rate, the more of Bitcoin’s remaining supply they are likely to earn. However, even with record dominance over the industry, JP Morgan says their projected future BTC earnings look awfully low compared to how the market is pricing them today.

“The aggregate market cap of the 14 largest U.S.-listed miners, is about 131% as large as their relative share of the nominal value of all remaining Bitcoin,” wrote Smith. By comparison, the average ratio of miner market cap to remaining BTC has been 78% since January 2022.

A look at Bitcoin’s “hashprice”—a measure of overall Bitcoin mining profitability—is also discouraging, down more than 50% from pre-halving levels.

According to JP Morgan, the mining firms that mined the most BTC in June per unit hash rate deployed were Hive Digital (HIVE) and Bitfarms (BITF).

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.