Bitcoin’s Billion-Dollar Pivot: MARA’s Bitcoin Sale, Whale Hoarding, and a Senate Showdown
13.05.2026 - 21:13:31 | boerse-global.de
Bitcoin markets are wrestling with a rare disconnect today: publicly traded miners are offloading billions in holdings while long-term investors are hoarding coins at a clip not seen since 2020. The asset is trapped in a tight range, with prices slipping to $79,469 on Wednesday after touching $80,485 earlier in the week, as a corporate shift toward artificial intelligence collides with a pivotal regulatory vote in Washington.
The clearest signal of this turnaround comes from MARA Holdings, which sold 20,880 bitcoin in the first quarter for $1.5 billion at an average price of roughly $70,000 per coin. The Nasdaq-listed miner is pouring that capital into a gas-fired power plant in Ohio, a 505-megawatt facility with enough land for data centers. The company’s focus is now firmly on artificial intelligence, not crypto mining. The reorientation is brutal: MARA has slashed 15% of its workforce, halted purchases of new mining hardware, and reported a net loss of $1.26 billion for the quarter. Revenue fell to $174.6 million, an 18% year-over-year decline, almost entirely due to the book-value write-down of its remaining bitcoin reserves.
MARA is hardly alone. Rivals such as IREN and Keel Infrastructure are also pivoting from mining to pure-play AI infrastructure. Since the end of 2024, the sector has signed over $70 billion in contracts tied to data-center deals, underscoring how deeply the industry’s center of gravity is shifting.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Bitcoin?
Yet while corporate miners exit stage left, a different cohort is piling in. So-called conviction buyers now hold nearly 4 million bitcoin, a 300% surge since the end of 2025. Analysts at Bitfinex compare the current accumulation wave to the post-Covid frenzy of 2020. Heavyweight buyers like MicroStrategy are visibly tightening the liquid supply on exchanges, creating a counterweight to the miner sell-off.
The next major catalyst could arrive Thursday, when the Senate Banking Committee votes on the CLARITY Act. The bill would establish a definitive market structure for digital assets and classify bitcoin as a commodity. Citigroup has linked its $143,000 price target for bitcoin directly to passage of the bill. But the clock is ticking: if the committee fails to act before the May 21 recess, the legislation could face years of delay. Large U.S. banking associations are lobbying hard against a related stablecoin compromise, fearful that every dollar in a crypto wallet is a dollar lost from cheap deposits. Prediction markets currently put the bill’s odds of success at 62%.
Macroeconomic headwinds are also weighing on the market. U.S. consumer prices rose 3.8% in April, the highest reading in three years, driven largely by elevated energy costs tied to the ongoing Middle East conflict. The Bank of America now expects the first rate cut to arrive only in the second half of 2027. That high-rate environment is a persistent drag on risk assets like bitcoin, which has shed roughly 10% since the start of the year.
Technically, bitcoin is testing support near $80,000 after falling below its 200-day moving average, now around $82,430. On the upside, institutional demand is providing a floor: American spot ETFs drew $2.44 billion in April alone. The combination of a Senate vote, the Trump-Xi summit, and the ongoing miner reshuffle leaves bitcoin at a precarious inflection point, where opposing forces could break the stalemate in either direction.
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