MicroStrategy (MSTR), the software company founded by Michael Saylor, is not the only large-scale corporate buyer of bitcoin (BTC), JPMorgan (JPM) said in a Wednesday report. Crypto miners are also adopting the accumulation strategy.
The shift to building up bitcoin holdings is driven by growing pressure on profitability, which stems from the reward halving in April and a rising network hashrate, the report said. Hashrate is the total computational power used to mine and process transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain and is a proxy for competition in the industry and mining difficulty.
“This likely prompted miners to hoard or seek further investments into bitcoin or diversify into AI/HPC businesses,” analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote, referring to artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.
Miners such as MARA Holdings (MARA) have adopted a similar bitcoin-buying strategy to MicroStrategy, called BTC yield, in response to these challenges, JPMorgan said.
MARA now owns 35,000 tokens ($3.5 billion) and is the second-largest publicly listed corporation in terms of bitcoin holdings.
The miners aren’t alone. Medical-device maker Semler Scientific has also been actively buying the world’s largest cryptocurrency, and now owns $144 million worth of crypto.
January’s introduction of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the U.S. has given institutional investors a more direct way to gain bitcoin exposure, the bank said. Shares of miners, which had been treated as a proxy for bitcoin, have underperformed as a result.
The bank noted that aside from buying more bitcoin, miners are increasingly financing their businesses via debt and equity offerings rather than selling their crypto reserves to cover operational costs.
Miners have raised more than $10 billion in equity so far this year, eclipsing the previous high of $9.5 billion in 2021, the report added.
Read more: Bitcoin Miners Cipher, CleanSpark and MARA Upgraded at JPMorgan