Mining Equities Diverge from Bitcoin Price
Investors who want exposure to bitcoin mining face a choice between buying individual operators and investing in a fund that holds a basket of them. Buying individual operators gives concentrated exposure to a specific business, while funds spread the position across the sector.
The key difference is that mining equities have stopped tracking bitcoin's price over the past year. In 2026, Riot Platforms gained 29.9%, CleanSpark gained 22.7%, and Hut 8 gained 188.1% while MARA fell 36.1%. Any thesis treating these shares as geared to bitcoin needs revisiting.
Bitcoin mining companies generate value by converting electricity into bitcoin through specialized machines that make trillions of guesses per second at the cryptographic puzzle securing the network.