Trump tariffs offer few rewards to BTC block reward miners

Block reward miners are reeling from America’s chaotic approach to international trade relations and the uncertainty taking a toll on the BTC token’s fiat price.

• Tariffs wreak havoc on miner share prices
• Scramble to import ASIC rigs
• Trump asks: who wants to play deal or self-deal?
• Hut 8, Trump JV already has NASDAQ ticker
• Trump loves coal, MARA loves flared gas
• March production rankings

April 2025 has definitely lived up (or down) to its reputation as ‘the cruelest month’ for U.S. block reward miners, as President Donald Trump’s incoherent global trade policies played havoc with their share prices and supply chains. For a brief moment, it seemed like things were ticking back upward, but this saga is anything but over.

Take MARA (NASDAQ: MARA), whose shares were trading around $14.60 late last month, well off their $30+ peak in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s re-election last November, but much better than their Thursday close of $11.74 (-4.6% for the day).

Similar plunges plagued other prominent miners, including Riot Platforms (NASDAQ: RIOT), which was trading around $8.75 at the end of March but closed Thursday at $6.79 (-8%). Riot shares are now down nearly 50% from their 2025 peak in late January Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR) was just under $12 in late March but closed Thursday at $7.60 (-14%). Bitdeer is down more than 70% from its January peak. And so on…

Among miners, MARA is the most vocal proponent of a ‘BTC reserve strategy.’ MARA currently holds 47,531 BTC tokens, making it the second-largest publicly traded BTC hoarder after Michael Saylor’s Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy
NASDAQ: MSTR). On March 28, MARA announced plans to raise up to $2 billion via shares of its common stock to—surprise!—acquire still more BTC.

MARA hitching its wagon to BTC’s star means its share price moves in tandem with the token’s fiat value. MARA rode this rollercoaster as BTC went from over $86,000 on April 2—the day Trump first announced details of his tariff plan—to below $75,000 five days later.

BTC briefly bounced back up over $83,000 on April 9 after the crashing bond market forced Trump to rethink his tariff plans. However, the token dipped below $79,000 by midday on April 10 as the euphoria wore off, and everyone realized we were still stuck in a global trade war with no resolution.

And for the record, MARA’s $1.53 billion purchase of 15,574 BTC in December was made at an average token price of $96,000—$17,000 higher than its current price—making that deal nearly $265 million in the red. And they’re buying more?

Last chopper out of Saigon

Uncertainty over global trade has weighed particularly hard on miners, who rely on rigs made in China by companies like Bitmain and MicroBT. With Trump raising tariffs on China on an almost daily basis—they hit 145% on Thursday, effectively a trade embargo—the price of those mining rigs will go through the roof, and that’s if they’re allowed into the U.S. at all.

On April 4, The Mining Pod podcast featured Ethan Vera, CEO of miner Luxor, recalling how his company convened a “war room in which we’re all hands on deck” to discuss how to mitigate the tariff impact on importing mining rigs. Vera said U.S. miners were engaging in a “mad scramble” to arrange immediate shipments of foreign-made rigs before the tariffs kicked in.

Vera revealed that “people are renting … isolated planes to fly this over, they’re pressuring Bitmain to get … machines picked up from warehouses in an expedited manner.” Blockspace reported that some miners were “chartering flights at 2-4x the usual rate, anywhere from $2-3.5 million per flight.”

U.S. miners who didn’t act quickly enough are finding that the cost of new rigs is now prohibitively expensive. Hashlabs Mining CEO Jaran Mellerud suggested this could boost mining production outside the U.S. as Chinese manufacturers might be forced to offload excess inventory cheaply to non-U.S. miners.

There’s been some speculation that U.S. miners might choose to open new sites in other countries to dodge the tariffs. However, that risks earning Trump’s ire for effectively refuting his claims that tariffs will help bring business back to America, as well as acting contrary to his wish to make America the world’s undisputed heavyweight mining champion.

All this comes as miners are struggling with all-time high difficulty rates on the BTC network, pushing the cost of mining a single BTC—including the cost of constantly replacing those pricey rigs to keep pace with competitors—over $89,000, roughly $10,000 higher than the token is currently worth. So, um, not good.

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Transaction action

Fear not, struggling miners, because Trump’s transactional approach to, well, everything may offer mining companies—particularly those whose chief execs aren’t afraid to pucker up and kiss his ass—a way out of their hardware dilemma.

Speaking to the press following Wednesday’s tariff climbdown, Trump was asked whether he’d offer certain U.S. companies exemptions from the import tariffs that remain. Trump said that some companies, “by the nature of the company, get hit a little bit harder, and we’ll take a look at that.” Asked how he’d determine which companies qualified for exemptions, Trump said only: “Instinctively.” We get a sense of how Trump might proceed from reports that Jensen Huang, CEO of chipmaker extraordinaire Nvidia
(NASDAQ: NVDA)—which also makes mining-specific GPUs—had pitched Trump last week on allowing Nvidia to continue selling its most advanced H20 chips to China.

Following a $1 million-a-plate dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, at which Huang pledged to invest in new U.S.-based AI data centers, the government paused plans to slap more export controls on the H20 chips, despite national security concerns and America’s determination to ‘win’ the global AI race. See how it’s done, kids?

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American Bitcoin Proxy

Apart from openly selling political favors, Trump has other reasons for protecting the U.S mining sector, including the fact that his family is now part-owner of a mining group. The American Bitcoin Corporation (ABC) partnership/amalgamation with Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT) is barely a week old, but the company has already pushed ahead with its plans for a public listing by securing a stock symbol.

In its launch announcement, ABC hinted at plans for (initially) private investment and (ultimately) a public listing on the Nasdaq. Hut 8 CEO Asher Genoot confirmed to Fortune that ABC would list under the symbol $ABTC, likely within the next two years, as Nasdaq rules won’t hold the symbol any longer than that.

Trump’s son Eric told Fortune that ABC would ultimately “become a Bitcoin proxy,” suggesting a similar path blazed by MARA and MSTR. Hut 8 currently holds 10,264 BTC on its balance sheet, but hopefully, Genoot was savvy enough to ensure that the 20% of the Hut 8 mining business he effectively gave the Trump family via the ABC deal doesn’t include BTC the company already worked so hard to acquire.

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Burn, baby, burn

During his 2024 election campaign, Trump promised miners that he’d scrap environmental regulations to ensure they had abundant supplies of cheap energy to power their operations. Trump extended the same pledge to companies with high-performance computing (HPC) operations supporting AI data centers (which includes the miners who ‘pivoted to AI’ as mining economics went south).

This week, Trump issued a flurry of executive orders aimed at fulfilling these energy pledges, including (deep breath) removing regulations that hinder coal mining, rescinding federal rules limiting coal-fired electricity generation, preventing states from overriding federal wishes to gut environmental laws, sunsetting existing regulations governing energy production, and utilizing every energy source possible to shore up electricity grids to meet the “demand driven by rapid technological advancements, including the expansion of artificial intelligence data centers.”

Trump may be willing to rubbish environmental concerns but some miners are still trying to offset the public perception that they’re consuming vast quantities of energy for no worthwhile purpose other than confirming speculative bets on BTC’s fiat price.

MARA, for example, is promoting its use of flared natural gas to power its operations in Texas and North Dakota. MARA said its partnership with ‘natural gas onsite neutralization’ specialists NGON Solutions has reduced 29,300 metric tons of “carbon dioxide equivalent emissions” by flaring the methane from oil wells in the two states.

So it’s no surprise that MARA came out strongly in support of the Facilitate Lower Atmospheric Released Emissions
(FLARE) bill issued last week by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). Cruz said the goal behind the bill was to make his home state “the number one place for Bitcoin mining.”

The four-page bill offers energy firms significant incentives for writing off the costs of gear used to intake natural gas and convert it to electricity. The bill includes “mining for digital assets” in the list of ‘applicable energy properties’ that qualify for the write-offs.

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Marching on

As always, the March 2025 production reports of publicly traded miners are listed below in descending order of magnitude. As referenced last month, this list no longer includes TeraWulf, which appears to have dispensed with its need to update investors on their monthly progress.

• MARA produced 829 BTC in March, a sharp uptick from 706 in February, despite an only modest increase in energized hash rate. Echoing the mantra that it’s better to be lucky than good, chairman/CEO Fred Thiel said MARA’s “luck factor has exceeded the network average by over 10% since launch, meaning more blocks mined and higher rewards.” However, unlike last month’s report, in which miners protested that month-on-month declines were due to February having three fewer days, nobody is crediting their new month-on-month gains to the three extra days in March. Just sayin’
• CleanSpark mined 706 BTC in March, up from 624 in February. Referencing the tariff situation, CEO/President Zach Bradford said his company was “well-prepared,” unlike some of his competitors, “who lack our scale and resilience.” Meowww…
• Iris Energy (NASDAQ: IREN) tied for third place in the March sweepstakes with Riot (see below), mining 533 BTC, up from 359 in February, as hash rate ticked up 1.6 points to 30.3 EH/s. IREN’s nascent AI Cloud Services unit had its best month to date, generating revenue of $1.6 million, up from $1.2 million in February and twice January’s $800,000. That’s good because IREN announced on March 31 that it would “pause all further Bitcoin Mining expansion” once it completed its 52 EH/s buildout over the next few months. The halt is part of IREN’s “deliberate reallocation of capital and continued management focus toward AI data centers and cloud infrastructure.” (That’s a long way of saying ‘BTC mining has no future.’)
• Riot’s 533 BTC total was 13% better than in February, despite the hash rate barely budging month-to-month. The March total is also the best the company has performed since last spring’s ‘halving’ of the block reward. At the end of March, Riot held 19,223 BTC, having sold not a single token last month
• Bitfarms (NASDAQ: BITF) had a banner March, earning 280 BTC, up from just 213 in February, as the hash rate shot up by more than one-fifth to 16.4 EH/uM (under management). Alex Brammer, SVP of global mining operations, said the company had reached its Q2 efficiency schedule three months ahead of schedule. On April 2, Bitfarms reached a deal with Macquarie Group to raise up to $300 million to fund the development of a new data center in Pennsylvania
• Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ) self-mined 247 BTC in March, up from 215 in February, the three extra days compensating for a minor drop in hash rate
• Cipher Mining (NASDAQ: CIFR) mined 210 BTC in March, 30 better than February’s total. Unlike the mining HODL’ers, Cipher sold 206 of the BTC it mined in March, leaving it with a treasury of 1,034 tokens (and likely humming Steve Miller’s Take the Money and Run.)
• Bitdeer self-mined 114 BTC in March, four more than in February. But expectations are high for the coming months now that the new in-house Sealminer rigs will be added to operations by the end of this month. According to a recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, the stake held in Bitdeer by Tether, the issuer of the market-leading USDT stablecoin, increased from 21.4% to 22.8%
• Hive Digital (TSXV: HIVE) mined 108 BTC in March, up from 89 in February. Apart from the three extra days, Hive benefited from the commencement of Phase 1 of operations at its hydro-powered 200 megawatt (MW) site in Yguazú, Paraguay
• Canaan Inc (NASDAQ: CAN) missed last month’s recap, but generated 90 BTC in March, up from 82 in February
• HUT 8 self-mined 88 BTC in March, a return to form after February’s woeful 46 BTC total. (That will hopefully calm down any Trump family members who call up CEO Genoot and yell at him that he’s making them look bad.) February’s poor showing was due to the slow delivery of new Bitmain rigs, making it all the more likely that certain companies, which—as Donald put it—get hit a little bit harder than others by his tariffs, might miraculously catch a break on their importation process. Bet on it
• The Bitmain-affiliated BitFuFu (NASDAQ: FUFU) self-mined 58 BTC in March, only one better than February’s total. Cloud-mining customers fared better, producing 176 BTC last month, up from 161 in February.) BitFuFu was able to dodge the tariff carnage by importing/installing 6,000 new mining rigs before the end of March
• Finally, BIT Mining (NYSE: BTCM) also returns to our countdown after missing last month due to an extremely late filing. BTCM produced 41.5 BTC in March, one fewer than February’s tally. BTCM also mines Dogecoin (DOGE) and Litecoin (LTC), producing nearly 2.4 million (+25% from February) of the former and 651 (+19%) of the latter

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