Cheatsheet: Bitcoin miner treasuries now worth $131B — a new all-time high

Bitcoin miners are slowly shrinking their collective BTC treasuries, but they’re still worth more than ever

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This is Cheatsheet, a primer on what’s happening in crypto today.

Bitcoin has broken another price record, now trading above $72,000 for the first time ever.

Still, BTC isn’t the best performing crypto in the top 100 over the day: that’s floki (FLOKI), the dog coin, which has gained 19.4% as of 7:45 am, ET.

Blockchain-powered video streaming platform Theta Network (THETA) trails slightly amid continued interest in decentralized computing.

Pyth Network (PYTH), the oracle network tipped as a rival to Chainlink (LINK), is third for the day with 18.2%. 

NEAR follows with 13.3% gains, itself boosted by buzz around its potential for use in AI development. Bitcoin and ether (ETH) are both up by about 3%.

Dog-slash-hat memecoin dogwifhat (WIF) is meanwhile the worst performer, down more than 8%.

On-chain mail

Bitcoin’s price is still going up — for now — as miner treasuries shrink to their lowest point in almost three years.

  • Miner treasuries have altogether reduced by 14,128 BTC ($1 billion) so far this year.
  • Most days over the past month have seen net outflows from bitcoin miners.
  • They still hold 1.82 million BTC ($131 billion) — the highest US dollar value on record.

Miners, on the surface, appear to be playing the role opposite to ETFs: offloading their bitcoin as institutions snap up coins on behalf of ETF shareholders.

Bitcoin kept on crypto exchanges has also been trending downward over the past year, hitting its lowest point since Jan. 2018 earlier this month: 2.019 million BTC ($126.02 billion at the time).

Bitcoin is up 15% since then, leading to an uptick in net inflows to crypto exchanges. There’s more than 14,000 additional BTC on exchanges over the month to date, equal to $1 billion at current prices.

  • Yield-focused Ethereum layer-2 Blast is rocketing up the TVL charts — now $830 million, up 161% over the past week to eclipse Mantra, Base and Sui.
  • Hyperliquid, a DEX for perpetual swaps on Arbitrum, saw more volume than any other such platform over the past day, $1.623 billion to dYdX’s $1.482 billion.
  • Binance Smart Chain saw more daily DEX volume than any other chain on Sunday — $2.474 billion to Ethereum’s $2.042 billion — a first since last May.
Miners have historically played influential roles in bitcoin markets during bull cycles

Crypto business

With bitcoin again at record highs, all crypto stocks are set to open higher on Monday, except two: Toronto-headquartered Bitfarms and China-based SOS.

  • MicroStrategy and Coinbase persist as market favorites, up 8.2% and 6.9% respectively before the bell (as of 7 am ET).
  • Miners Bitfarms and SOS have both slipped more than 5.5%.
  • CleanSpark is by far the best performing mining stock over the past month — climbing nearly 130%.

Open interest (OI) on bitcoin futures is going parabolic, $33.72 billion as of this morning, a new record, up 10% since Friday and nearly double since the start of the year.

Bitcoin OI had previously topped out at just over $24 billion in Apr. 2021, during the last bull market.

Ether (ETH) open interest is also at record highs, now $12.67 billion and more than double since the start of the year.

  • Solana (SOL)’s OI is retracing from its own peak late last week, down to $2.07 billion from $2.25 billion, per CoinGlass.
  • US-listed bitcoin ETFs are now up more than 42% on their inflows to date.
  • Crypto held by the US government through criminal seizures is now valued at $15.64 billion.

On the ground

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