Crypto’s recent sell-off isn’t just a price story — it’s affecting corporate balance sheets, exchange-traded funds and how mining infrastructure is used when markets tighten.
Ether’s decline has left treasury-heavy firms nursing large paper losses, while Bitcoin ETFs are giving many investors their first exposure to sustained downside moves. At the same time, extreme weather has underscored miners’ reliance on power grids, and some former crypto miners have repurposed hardware into AI infrastructure.
BitMine’s ETH paper losses widen
BitMine Immersion Technologies, chaired by Tom Lee, is facing growing unrealized losses after Ether fell below $2,200 in the latest downturn. The company holds roughly $9.1 billion in ETH — including a recent buy of 40,302 ETH — and its unrealized losses have exceeded $7 billion. Those losses remain on paper unless assets are sold, but they highlight the vulnerability of treasuries concentrated in volatile tokens. Lee responded to criticism by noting that unrealized losses are inherent to firms designed to track ETH’s price.
BlackRock Bitcoin ETF holders slip underwater
As Bitcoin dropped under $80,000 (and later below $75,000), aggregate returns for investors in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) moved negative, according to industry observers. Bob Elliott, CIO of Unlimited Funds, said the average dollar invested in IBIT is now underwater. IBIT was one of BlackRock’s fastest-growing ETFs, becoming the firm’s quickest fund to reach $70 billion in assets. The sell-off is giving those investors a practical lesson in Bitcoin’s downside volatility.
US winter storm slams Bitcoin production
A late-January winter storm in the US forced many miners to curtail operations, showing how sensitive mining output remains to energy-grid stress. CryptoQuant data indicated that daily production from publicly listed miners averaged about 70–90 BTC before the storm, then plunged to around 30–40 BTC at the storm’s peak as operations reduced load or temporarily shut down. Production recovered as conditions improved. The data covered public miners such as CleanSpark, MARA Holdings, Bitfarms and Iris Energy, illustrating how large-scale US facilities respond when local power is constrained.
CoreWeave shows how crypto infrastructure became AI’s data center backbone
CoreWeave’s shift from GPU-based crypto mining to AI and high-performance computing provides a clear example of mining-era hardware being repurposed for the AI boom. Ethereum’s move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake reduced demand for GPU mining, pushing operators like CoreWeave to pivot into AI services. CoreWeave no longer operates as a crypto company; its transition has become a model for other miners exploring diversification, including HIVE Digital, Hut 8 and MARA Holdings. Nvidia’s $2 billion equity investment in CoreWeave reinforced the view that infrastructure built for mining is now a significant layer of AI data-center capacity.
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