Canaan Sells All ETH, 54 BTC to Fund Buyback

Canaan, the Nasdaq-listed bitcoin mining hardware maker, has liquidated its entire Ethereum position and sold off a slice of its Bitcoin holdings, using the proceeds to fund one of its largest share buybacks of the year. In an operating update covering August, the company said it sold all 3,952 ETH it held at an average price of about $2,400 per token, along with 54 BTC at roughly $79,000 each, generating combined proceeds of approximately $13.9 million.

The company put $5.4 million of that cash directly into repurchasing 13.6 million American Depositary Shares during the month, bringing its total buybacks under the current program to 16.4 million ADSs — a sharp acceleration from the 2.8 million shares it had repurchased for about $2.0 million across the entire first half of 2026. The repurchase authority itself is not new: Canaan's board renewed a $30 million buyback program in December 2025, covering a 12-month window that runs through the end of this year, but August marks by far the most aggressive month of execution under that mandate.

The buyback push follows a rough quarter for the company's core business. Canaan's Q2 revenue collapsed 68% year-over-year to $31.9 million, and its net loss widened to $97.6 million from just $11.1 million a year earlier — a swing driven by a $25.3 million inventory write-down, a $9.2 million impairment on property and equipment, and an $18.2 million fair-value loss on its crypto holdings as prices slid during the quarter. Shares fell roughly 9% on the earnings print, and management guided next quarter's revenue down further, to between $11 million and $15 million. Selling off crypto to fund buybacks in that environment reads less like routine treasury management and more like a direct response to a stock that management believes has been punished more than the underlying mining business warrants.

Selling the Side Bets to Defend the Stock

What stands out is the order of operations. Rather than tapping cash reserves or new financing, Canaan chose to fully exit its ETH position — a smaller, more diversified holding relative to its core Bitcoin treasury — while trimming BTC only modestly, leaving 1,868 BTC on the balance sheet at month-end alongside 44 BTC mined during August itself. That leaves the company's primary crypto exposure intact while converting a secondary, less strategically important position into buyback ammunition.

In its own disclosure, CEO Nangeng Zhang framed the moves as “active capital allocation,” monetizing assets “at relatively favorable market conditions” because management believes the stock's current valuation “does not fully reflect the Company's underlying assets and performance.” That's a common refrain among crypto-adjacent miners this year, but Canaan's specific choice to fund it by exiting ETH entirely rather than selling more BTC signals a view that Bitcoin remains the core treasury asset worth holding through volatility, while Ethereum was a position the company was comfortable closing out completely.

The pattern echoes moves elsewhere in the sector: crypto-treasury companies trading below the net asset value of their holdings have increasingly turned to selling a portion of that treasury to buy back stock at a discount, effectively arbitraging the gap between market price and balance-sheet value. It's a strategy that only works as long as the company retains enough core holdings to keep the treasury thesis intact — which is likely why Canaan kept the bulk of its Bitcoin stack untouched while zeroing out Ethereum instead.

Canaan's mining operations continued in parallel through August, with non-joint-venture installed hashrate holding at 10.05 EH/s and joint-venture capacity reaching 4.92 EH/s, alongside an average all-in power cost of $0.043 per kilowatt-hour. The company is also pushing ahead with a compute heat-recovery greenhouse project in Canada, installing equipment ahead of winter operations — a diversification move that sits alongside, rather than in place of, its core hardware and mining business. With the buyback program running through December and roughly $22.6 million of the $30 million authorization still available, investors will be watching whether Canaan continues drawing down its remaining BTC treasury to keep funding repurchases, or shifts back to relying on mining cash flow as the year closes out.