CEOs at major Bitcoin mining companies are nevertheless “upbeat” ahead of this week’s halving event despite not outperforming Bitcoin year-to-date, according to research and trading firm Bernstein.
Gautam Chhugani and Mahika Sapra published a letter to clients on Monday citing the underperformance as a result of high U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund flows that are “sucking away” retail liquidity from miner stocks and worries about how the halving will affect miners’ revenue.
In recent interviews with Bernstein, Marathon CEO Fred Thiel stated that the market has thus far viewed mining stocks as little more than bitcoin proxies and that, since the debut of the ETFs, a popular trade has been to go long spot Bitcoin ETFs and short the miners, which explains the underperformance.
Zack Bradford, the CEO of CleanSpark, told Bernstein that after the halving, the price of Bitcoin mining stocks will rise because the consolidated winners would gain more than smaller, less productive miners.
According to Bradford, there will only be four major public miners in the mining sector: CleanSpark, Marathon, Riot Platforms, and Cipher Mining. In the competition for acquisition targets, Thiel reportedly called CleanSpark their “arch competitor,” echoing the attitude.
Meanwhile, Chhugani and Sapra stated that Riot was more intent on organic growth because it felt the market had penalized it for the lower efficiency and uptime of its current fleet.
However, once it opens a new 1 GW site to more than double its capacity for the remainder of 2024, that belief should change. Recently, Marathon purchased additional Bitcoin mining locations, and by the end of this year, CleanSpark hopes to have doubled its capacity.
The next Bitcoin halving event is now only five days away, or roughly 800 blocks away. As of right now, that might happen on April 20 at 5:40 a.m. UTC (1:40 a.m. ET).
Also Read: How Bitcoin Halving Helps In Increasing Crypto Adoption?
