MARA Holdings, the world's largest publicly traded Bitcoin miner, sold approximately 23,093 BTC for $1.63 billion during the first half of 2026, at an average price of about $70,631 per coin. The disclosure, made in the company's 10-Q filing with the SEC, marks one of the largest bitcoin divestitures by a public miner so far this year.
Despite the scale of the sales, MARA's on-chain treasury didn't collapse: because the company continuously mines new bitcoin, its total holdings fell from 38,507 BTC at the end of 2025 to 26,307 BTC as of June 30, a net decline of roughly 12,200 BTC even as gross sales ran nearly double that figure.
Funding a pivot toward AI
The filing ties the sales directly to a strategic reallocation: MARA said it is redirecting resources toward AI initiatives and related critical IT and high-performance computing (HPC) opportunities, alongside debt repayment and general liquidity needs. That mirrors a broader trend among bitcoin miners this year, several of which have concluded that their existing power contracts and data-center infrastructure are worth more repurposed for AI compute than dedicated to mining alone. Keel went further, shutting down its US bitcoin mining operations entirely to pivot fully into AI data centers, while MARA's approach so far keeps a mining business running alongside the new AI push.
The filing also disclosed a $964.2 million negative swing in the fair value of MARA's digital-asset holdings over the six-month period, a reminder that even miners who continue accumulating bitcoin through production can see their balance sheets whipsawed by price volatility on the portion they choose to hold rather than sell.
Part of a wider treasury reset
MARA's disclosure adds to a string of corporate bitcoin sales this earnings season. Strategy has sold roughly 6,916 BTC over six consecutive weeks to fund share buybacks, while Trump Media's crypto portfolio has shed hundreds of millions in value even as its coin count barely moved. MARA's sales stand out for being explicitly production-funded rather than balance-sheet liquidation: because the company mines new supply continuously, its selling doesn't necessarily signal reduced conviction in bitcoin so much as a decision to convert a larger share of newly mined coins into cash rather than holding them on the balance sheet.
Whether that mix shifts further toward AI infrastructure spending in the second half of the year will likely depend on how bitcoin's price trades against the returns MARA can generate from repurposed compute capacity, a calculation an increasing number of miners are now running in parallel.
