This report shouldn’t be, and should not be thought-about as monetary, funding, or authorized recommendation. The writer holds no positions in Bitcoin mining shares.
Government Abstract
For this sixteenth semiannual cryptocurrency supercomputing report, as soon as once more three cash make the lower for proof of labor (hash energy) generated annual financial worth. In combination the annual minted worth is round $12 billion for Bitcoin, Doge, and Zcash, and 93% of that is because of Bitcoin. No different POW coin exceeds $100 million in annual manufacturing.
Bitcoin had a big pullback in worth throughout This fall, falling by over 50% and apparently bottoming in February and revisiting that backside this month. It appears to have resumed its long run climb and is buying and selling round $66,000 presently. This pullback has squeezed miner margins and accelerated the pivot towards AI and HPC infrastructure internet hosting. They need to change to GPUs from ASICs so as to take action, however get pleasure from working on the environment friendly power frontier and may provide aggressive internet hosting charges.
Three nations: the US, China, and Russia dominate international hashrate with almost 2/3 of all of the hashrate between them, however there may be additionally continued diffusion towards smaller international locations with low-cost electrical energy inputs.
Hydrocooled techniques have grow to be more and more vital within the ASIC system combine, and particular person machines are approaching the 1000 Terahash/sec or 1 Petahash/sec (10¹⁵) degree in a worldwide community that’s of order 1 Zettahash (10²¹) sec. One sees instantly then that there are a number of hundreds of thousands of machines concerned, contemplating a mixture of older and newer techniques.
Bitcoin mining is now not merely “minting cash.” It’s evolving into:
- a planetary-scale power balancing layer,
- versatile compute infrastructure,
- sovereign financial infrastructure,
- and a thermodynamic monetization community.
from electrical energy and the cryptographic calculations of a steady winner-take-all lottery, carried out above floor.
Introduction
We produce the CryptoSuper 500 report twice a 12 months, across the time of the 2 main supercomputing conferences: SC held within the US in November, and ISC held in Could/June in Germany. That is the sixteenth report, representing 7.5 years of protection. The prior fifteenth report from November 2025 is right here:
https://cryptoassets0417.medium.com/cryptosuper-report-15-q4-2025-70fffc59b4a4
We observe Bitcoin and some different proof of labor cryptocurrencies as a result of they’re a specialised type of excessive efficiency computing. Bitcoin shouldn’t be AI, however it’s a self-organizing autopoietic and chronic community for holding and transferring worth that has endured for 17.5 years.
Why a Bitcoin Customary
In contrast to different financial tech Bitcoin defines a scientifically exact commonplace for provide that can also be rooted immediately in power and math.
The algorithm has diminished provide emission each 4 years such that now every new block mints 3.125 Bitcoin. That reward will likely be lower in half once more in two extra years and the inflation price will drop from 0.8% to 0.4%. There may be an absolute cap on the availability of 21 million and there are lower than 1 million BTC but to be mined.
If Bitcoin have been an organization it might be the thirteenth largest by market cap; presently the community represents $1.3 trillion in worth.
It’s successfully the world’s largest decentralized supercomputer, consisting of hundreds of thousands of competing and cooperating techniques, all working the identical Nakamoto consensus algorithm in a continuous lottery with a winner-take-all award for every block of roughly 10 minutes’ length.
Gold comparability
Bitcoin’s worth over its historical past has risen dramatically in gold phrases, adhering to an influence regulation steeper than the fifth energy of Bitcoin’s age.
Whereas gold holds its worth by means of time, Bitcoin has outperformed gold and can even transfer in a short time in area, crossing the globe in an hour.
For the reason that battle between the U.S. and Iran started on February 28, Bitcoin’s worth has risen by over a 3rd towards gold; it has been a simpler geopolitical hedge throughout disaster. One motive is that Bitcoin is far more transportable, it may be despatched anyplace throughout the globe inside an hour (6 block confirmations). Iran has began accepting Bitcoin for tolls (charges) on ships passing by means of the Strait of Hormuz.
There may be not but robust public affirmation of large-scale crude oil purchases or settlements immediately denominated in Bitcoin between sovereign states or main oil corporations.
Proof of Work cash
Out of 51 million (!) cryptocurrencies there are presently simply 55 with over $1 billion market cap. Bitcoin’s market cap is $1500 billion, and there may be an order of magnitude 1 Zettahash/sec of computational energy dedicated to decentralized Bitcoin minting, from a number of million Bitcoin techniques across the globe. That is the world’s largest decentralized supercomputer.
Virtually all cryptocurrencies and there issuers are lazy. They aren’t created through actual work and power consumption. They’re air-dropped initially (created in skinny air) and develop provide through proof of stake or related algorithms. That is extra akin to promoting shares in an organization and under no circumstances like mining or minting.
Solely 7 of the 55 are Proof of Work cash, utilizing vital computational hash energy to mint new cash and safe their networks and transactions. And of these, solely three make our lower of over $200 million manufacturing per 12 months, and are listed in Desk 1. Failing to make the lower have been Bitcoin Money, Litecoin, Monero, and Ethereum Basic (an outdated variant that also makes use of hashing).
Complete annual manufacturing is thus $11.8 billion together with transaction charges that are working lower than one % of the block reward whole. They’re within the vary of $0.086 billion per 12 months.
Hashrate and Problem
Over the total historical past Bitcoin hashrate has grown because the eleventh energy of Bitcoin age however with vital variability. The expansion was quicker early on, amplified by the change from CPUs to GPUs to SHA-256 personalized ASICs adopted by fast development within the ASIC designs.
For the previous variety of years the speed of development seems to have slowed to across the fifth or sixth energy of age, nonetheless very fast.
Regardless of the slowing, the issue degree is now round 125 trillion (dimensionless items) having began from issue equal to 1, and the current degree corresponds to a worldwide hashrate on the Zettascale degree (10²¹ hashes/second). As of mid-June, 2026 the 30 day common is 0.95 Zettahash/sec.
Power
Bitcoin miners have at all times pursued the bottom value electrical energy inputs. The most recent broadly cited figures from the Cambridge Centre for Various Finance (CCAF) and its 2025 Cambridge Digital Mining Business Report are:
- Annual Bitcoin electrical energy consumption: ~138 TWh/12 months (common of twenty-two GigaWatts)
- Share of world electrical energy consumption: ~0.5%
- Sustainable power share: 52.4% whole sustainable sources: 42.6% renewables, 9.8% nuclear
- Pure gasoline share: 38.2% (now the biggest single supply)
Bitcoin mining is ready to attain distant and stranded power sources together with pure gasoline and flared and vented methane, even landfill methane, and may mitigate atmospheric air pollution. Hydroelectric sources are superb, together with wind and photo voltaic in distant areas. Bitcoin mining rigs may be dropped in adjoining to the sources since low-bandwidth Web connections are enough.
Bitcoin mining was as soon as severely criticized for power utilization, nevertheless it has by no means reached 1% of world electrical energy and the issues have shifted to knowledge middle necessities. Bitcoin inputs are greener than datacenter at this level.
Daniel Batten is likely one of the finest voices round selling Bitcoin’s position in stabilizing power grids. He argues — fairly efficiently — that Bitcoin mining needs to be seen not merely as electrical energy consumption, however as a versatile, interruptible power infrastructure layer that may stabilize grids, monetize stranded power, take up renewable overbuild, and enhance the economics of recent energy technology tasks.
“As a result of Bitcoin mining is the one power person on the planet the place a gargantuan 80% of working prices are spent on energy, Bitcoin mining items are usually the one enterprise for whom it’s worthwhile to hunt and destroy methane and use it for energy in distant locations with poor Web connectivity, the place the capital prices to make the most of that methane are excessive.” — Daniel Batten
Mining is more and more seen not merely as:
- power consumption,
but additionally as:
- versatile interruptible load,
- artificial demand response,
- and financial storage for stranded or intermittent power.
The literature and utility discussions now regularly body mining as:
- “digital battery” infrastructure,
- particularly for renewables.
It is a main conceptual shift in comparison with the older environmental critique period.
From the Hashrate Index of 5/21/26: “Texas hosts a big share of world Bitcoin mining hashrate — roughly 17% as of mid-2026. When a big fraction of that capability curtails concurrently to keep away from a 4CP peak, the impact reveals up throughout a number of on-chain alerts…ERCOT’s 4 Coincident Peak (4CP) mechanism units a web site’s transmission cost for the following 12 months based mostly on its common load through the 4 highest 15-minute system peaks throughout June–September.”
Bitcoin miners are in a position to rein of their power utilization far more shortly than different hundreds when there may be stress on the grid, their load is extremely modular, and it’s self-funding.
Mining Gear
China continues to dominate within the design of ASICs for Bitcoin minting techniques, from corporations together with Bitmain, Canaan, and MicroBT. The fabs although are positioned in Taiwan (TSMC #1) and Korea (Samsung #2).
The forefront for Bitcoin minting ASIC techniques is now closely hydro/liquid cooled:
- Bitmain Antminer S23 and S21 Hydro,
- Bitdeer SealMiner sequence,
- and related platforms.
The optimization goal has shifted from:
- uncooked TH/s
towards: - Joules per terahash,
- thermal density,
- rack-scale cooling effectivity,
- and energy orchestration.
Mining more and more resembles HPC engineering, which is one motive why Bitcoin mining farms, together with their low electrical energy prices, are well-suited to host AI workloads as properly.
Mining Distribution and Corporations
In accordance with hashrateindex.com the US has 37% of world hashrate (1/3 or extra of that 37% in West Texas), Russia 16%, and China 12%. Collectively the highest three nations are accountable for almost 2/3 of all hashrate. Different vital international locations within the high 8 are Paraguay with 4%, Ethiopia, the UAE, Oman, and Canada with 3% every. That already provides as much as 80% of the hashrate being present in 8 international locations.
However this can be a substantial enchancment in decentralization, as prior to now China had been accountable for over 50% of world hashrate; they cracked down 5 years in the past as a result of power issues and capital flight issues, and maybe to assist promote their very own digital foreign money. Hashrate following these restrictions moved particularly to the US and Russia.
Over 25% of the hashrate is operated by publicly traded corporations, principally within the US. The highest 10 are tabulated in Desk 3 and collectively have 279 Terahash/sec. (not all of which is working concurrently).
There’s a massive pivot underway for these corporations so as to add AI and HPC capability to steadiness out their income streams and earn increased margins. Just a few structural observations for these corporations stand out:
1. The trade is more and more bifurcating into pure Bitcoin miners, and hybrid “energy + compute infrastructure” operators.
2. AI/HPC income is turning into materials in a short time. CoinShares projections cited in 2026 stories estimate that corporations like Core Scientific, IREN, and TeraWulf may derive a majority of income from AI/HPC workloads inside a 12 months or two.
3. The important thing scarce asset is now not merely ASIC fleets; it is:
- grid entry,
- substations,
- cooling infrastructure,
- and dispatchable megawatt-scale energy.
Bitcoin miners already possessed these property. The AI pivot monetizes them at a lot increased income multiples than SHA-256 mining alone.
4. Hashrate management presently stays concentrated in:
- MARA,
- CleanSpark,
- Riot,
- IREN,
- and Core Scientific.
5. The AI pivot is starting to cut back marginal Bitcoin-network enlargement stress as a result of some power capability is being diverted from SHA-256 mining into GPU compute.
The biggest offers just lately:
- Core Scientific remodeled itself from a distressed Bitcoin miner right into a premier AI/HPC infrastructure platform by means of large long-term internet hosting agreements and its strategic relationship with CoreWeave. Deal dimension: $10 billion.
- IREN Restricted executed one of many sector’s largest AI pivots by leveraging its renewable-powered mining campuses into hyperscale AI cloud infrastructure tied to partnerships involving Microsoft and NVIDIA. Deal dimension: $10 billion.
- TeraWulf repositioned its energy-intensive mining operations towards AI compute and data-center leasing by means of main HPC agreements and partnerships with Fluidstack and Core42. Deal dimension: $4 billion.
Hashrate Index on 5/22/2026 wrote “Miners with current knowledge middle infrastructure, energy relationships, and cooling capability are positioned to take part within the AI infrastructure buildout as this market validates. Whether or not by means of mullet mining hybrid operations, direct GPU and ASIC colocation for neoclouds and enterprise AI clients, or full transition to AI compute infrastructure, the optionality is extra beneficial than it seems at first look. The AI chip sector’s $100 billion-plus annual CapEx has to land someplace bodily. Bitcoin mining operators personal plenty of the bodily infrastructure it wants.”
The Bitcoin balances held by miners have been reducing of late as they pivot towards AI. They’ve offered a few of their Bitcoin as wanted for ‘pores and skin within the sport’ as a part of new financing packages for AI infrastructure buildout.
BTC in Treasuries
The online shopping for of Bitcoin has been primarily by means of ETFs and Treasury corporations in recent times, principally as custodians for his or her purchasers and shareholders. The quantity held in these corporations and funds has been rising quicker than the fourth energy of Bitcoin’s age.
Presently ETFs and exchanges maintain over 1.6 million Bitcoin, some 8% of the 20 million Bitcoin minted to date.
Public corporations maintain 1.26 million Bitcoin based on bitcointreasuries.web
Technique alone holds over 840,000 Bitcoin, which is 4% of the utmost 21 million provide.
Governments maintain 650,000 or 3% of provide, with the highest three being the US with over 300,000 BTC, China with 190,000 BTC, whereas the UK and Ukraine maintain about 61,000 and 46,000 respectively.
Non-public corporations together with BlockOne, Tether, and SpaceX maintain round 282,000 BTC and a few 380,000 is locked into DeFi protocols.
Nonetheless the huge bulk of Bitcoin seems to be in non-public fingers and people are the useful house owners of ETF holdings and treasury firm holdings for essentially the most half.
Supercomputing Comparability
Within the fifteenth report I in contrast the Bitcoin decentralized supercomputing minting community to the world’s quickest pc, El Capitan, and to the High 500 checklist of supercomputers.
El Capitan has a peak efficiency of 1.74 Exaflops (the unit is a billion billion floating level operations), and consists of 11 million GPU and CPU cores. It consumes 30–35 MegaWatts, which is of order 10,000 instances as a lot as a typical Bitcoin mining rig. The associated fee is $600 million and the science mission is of important nationwide significance.
However it might be of little use as a crypto mining system. How briskly may it hash Dogecoin? The Scrypt algorithm is designed to be extremely reminiscence intensive, and the Scrypt ASICS have their whole die as primarily one large SRAM scratchpad with a tiny compute wrapper round it. It’s estimated that El Capitan would mine roughly $47 price of Dogecoin per day — lower than a single Antminer L9 ASIC (~17 TH/s, ~$14,000) optimized for Scrypt. The reminiscence hierarchy mismatch is totally brutal for Scrypt on HPC silicon.
How about Bitcoin’s doubled SHA-256 algorithm? It’s about 75% bitwise logic and 25% 32-bit integer. Adopting generously 3 Exaops peak, and noting there are 1600 ops roughly within the the double SHA-256 hashing spherical, we’re taking a look at lower than 2 Petahashes/sec. That is corresponding to solely 2 to 4 ASIC mining rigs from Desk 2. Greater than 1,000,000 such of the very newest ASIC hashing techniques can be required to supply the worldwide hash price.
Bitcoin ASICs are multi-module, extremely pipelined, and really extremely parallel in replicating purposeful items, and likewise acquire monumental benefit as a result of they:
- hardwire the precise dataflow,
- get rid of instruction decode,
- get rid of caches,
- get rid of reminiscence hierarchy overhead,
- get rid of department/management logic,
- deeply pipeline the precise rotate/XOR/add construction,
- and maximize hashes/Joule relatively than generic ops/sec.
There’s a profound safety assertion right here — the financial and thermodynamic funding embodied within the Bitcoin community’s hashrate is now so massive that even nation-state supercomputing infrastructure is irrelevant to it. The community’s safety is anchored to cumulative power and extremely particular ASIC hashrate expenditure, to not any single machine’s compute ceiling.
It’s additionally price noting that Bitcoin miners crossed the Zettahash threshold (~10²¹ hashes/sec) quietly and with little fanfare, whereas the HPC group remains to be celebrating Exascale (~10¹⁸ FLOPs) as a frontier achievement. Bitcoin’s proof-of-work has outpaced civilian supercomputing by three orders of magnitude — a outstanding emergent property of the self-organizing nature of the Nakamoto consensus.
Quantum Threat
There are two areas of threat from quantum computing for the Bitcoin community. First one should comment that quantum computing is a threat to the whole monetary system and various quantum protected key mechanisms exist already, nevertheless they’re costlier to implement.
One threat is many many years away, and that will be Grover’s algorithm permitting quantum computer systems to generate SHA-256 hashes. However the clock charges of right this moment’s quantum computer systems are very gradual so this isn’t a sensible menace for a very long time to come back. And on the finish of the day it might simply be one other set of techniques mining Bitcoin and processing transactions on the community, not a strategy to steal cash.
The extra fast threat within the 5 to twenty 12 months timeframe (and it’s that unsure) is from Shor’s algorithm. It has the potential to threaten 256-bit keys as soon as there’s a machine with of order 1000 logical qubits in a position to crack a public key through the 10 minutes that transactions are sitting within the mempool ready for processing.
Shor’s algorithm would derive a personal key from an uncovered public key. Early Bitcoin output transactions from earlier than 2012 expose the general public keys always (P2PK) however since then most transactions solely expose keys whereas they’re being spent, inside a single block length. An vital observe is to not reuse addresses; as a substitute generate a brand new handle for every switch.
Glassnode Analysis estimates 9.6% of issued provide is uncovered by means of script constructions for which public keys are seen on the blockchain.
Present estimates are that it’s going to take 500,000 to 1,000,000 or extra bodily qubits in an effort to have sufficient coherently entangled logical qubits for Shor’s algorithm to succeed. There was very lively progress in decreasing the bodily to logical ratio, and that must be monitored.
However there are already a number of NIST accepted quantum-safe key algorithms, it’s primarily a matter of migrating Bitcoin and keys to quantum protected wallets. A lot of BIPs (Bitcoin enchancment proposals) are in varied phases of dialogue and progress to deal with the difficulty.
Very outdated cash that haven’t moved, reminiscent of Satoshi’s 1 million cash unfold throughout a lot of wallets, stay susceptible and there may be debate as as to if to freeze or throttle these or simply allow them to sit as an early warning system, the potential trillion greenback canary within the coal mine if Bitcoin’s worth retains following its long run steep energy regulation trajectory.
Outlook
The Bitcoin mining trade is coming into a brand new part of its maturation. The big publicly traded miners are more and more evolving into hybrid power, AI, and excessive efficiency computing infrastructure corporations relatively than remaining pure-play SHA-256 minting companies. Mockingly, this pivot might create extra alternative for decentralization inside Bitcoin mining itself. As massive corporations divert parts of their capital expenditure and electrical capability towards GPU clusters and AI internet hosting, smaller and mid-sized operators might regain competitiveness in SHA-256 mining. On the similar time, nation-states seem more and more prone to broaden their participation, whether or not by means of sovereign reserve accumulation, home mining initiatives, grid-balancing purposes, or strategic power monetization.
Bitcoin’s volatility has clearly been declining, roughly in inverse proportion to Bitcoin’s age, regardless of periodic extreme drawdowns. This moderation is vital as a result of it alleviates stress on miners, treasury corporations, lenders, and custodial establishments. A much less risky Bitcoin is less complicated to finance, simpler to collateralize, and extra suitable with sovereign and institutional steadiness sheets. If Bitcoin continues transitioning from a speculative rising asset towards a worldwide reserve settlement layer, declining volatility might finally show extra vital than short-term worth appreciation alone. Certainly, declining volatility permits for bigger and extra threat aware tiers of capital to take part.
The subsequent halving, anticipated in Q2 2028, will scale back the block subsidy from 3.125 BTC to 1.5625 BTC per block and decrease Bitcoin financial inflation from roughly 0.8% now right down to 0.4% yearly. Traditionally every halving has intensified aggressive stress inside mining whereas concurrently reinforcing Bitcoin’s shortage narrative. The approaching cycle could also be significantly attention-grabbing as a result of it’s going to happen in a world the place ETFs, treasury corporations, sovereign entities, AI infrastructure operators, and power markets at the moment are deeply entangled with the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Quantum computing stays a long-term engineering concern relatively than a right away existential menace. Present proof means that sensible assaults towards uncovered Bitcoin public keys are unlikely to grow to be operationally vital till someday within the subsequent decade, and even then just for a subset of susceptible legacy wallets and handle constructions. A number of quantum-safe signature techniques exist already, and the Bitcoin ecosystem has substantial time emigrate towards safer cryptographic requirements. In observe, quantum threat shouldn’t be distinctive to Bitcoin; it applies broadly to the worldwide monetary, governmental, and Web safety infrastructure.
Bitcoin minting will proceed to grow to be extra built-in into the worldwide power infrastructure.
In Daniel Batten’s view: “The way forward for Bitcoin mining is that it seeks out stranded power at close to zero marginal value. The way forward for Bitcoin mining is that it stabilizes grids and recycles warmth as a major income supply, with the block reward and costs being the by-product. The way forward for Bitcoin mining is that it solves onerous issues the world desperately wants — protecting our grid protected and secure, making AI load versatile, decreasing dangerous methane air pollution, stopping the wasteful observe of renewable power curtailment in ways in which profit entire communities.”
Extra broadly, Bitcoin mining is starting to resemble a brand new class of commercial infrastructure altogether: half financial community, half energy-balancing layer, half distributed supercomputing cloth, and half geopolitical reserve system. The community’s scale now exceeds civilian supercomputing by a number of orders of magnitude in uncooked cryptographic throughput, whereas concurrently integrating itself into electrical grids, capital markets, sovereign methods, and AI datacenter enlargement. What started as an experimental peer-to-peer foreign money has developed right into a planetary-scale thermodynamic and computational system whose long-term implications are nonetheless solely starting to emerge.
CryptoSuper Report #16 — June 2026 was initially revealed in The Capital on Medium, the place persons are persevering with the dialog by highlighting and responding to this story.