Investing.com -- Bitcoin has shed by more than 10% in less than a week, dropping from a comfortable position above $66,500 to around $61,300 as the market is digesting the refund of assets from now-defunct exchange Mt. Gox.
Mt. Gox’s trustee will reportedly start returning more than 141,900 BTC, valued at around $8.7 billion, to creditors beginning in July. Bitcoin reached a record high near $74,000 in mid-March, driven by a surge of interest in new spot exchange-traded funds, but its price has since fallen.
"While it's uncertain how much of the distributed BTC will be sold by creditors, we do not expect all or even most of the coins to be sold in the short term," H.C. Wainwright analysts commented. "Many of these early investors in BTC have a hodl mentality and very low cost bases."
Elsewhere, shares of AI-linked bitcoin miners outperformed pure-play miners, rising by 11.5% compared to a 1.4% increase for the latter group. This surge follows several announcements, including a $150 million investment by Coatue into Hut 8 (TSX:HUT) Corp (NASDAQ:HUT) via a convertible note to build data center infrastructure focused on AI. Additionally, two other public miners disclosed expanded contracts with existing AI customers.
"AI contracts come with recurring, high-margin revenue streams that are not susceptible to BTC price fluctuations," the analysts noted. "BTC miners are leveraging their infrastructure capacity to support AI compute, attracting new tech investors in the process."
Last Thursday, Nasdaq-listed software firm MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR) acquired an additional 11,931 BTC for $786 million, at an average price of about $65,900 per coin. With this latest acquisition, MicroStrategy's total holdings have increased to 226,331 tokens, worth just under $14 billion. The largest corporate holder of bitcoin invested over $8.3 billion into the original cryptocurrency since 2020.
In terms of hardware advancements, Bitmain unveiled its latest Antminer S21 series rigs at the World Digital Mining Summit in Las Vegas. The air-cooled S21 XP boasts 270 TH/s of computing power with an efficiency rating of 13.5 J/TH, a 10% improvement over the S21 Pro. Additionally, Bitmain announced the S21 XP Hydro, a hydro-cooled model with 473 TH/s and an efficiency rating of 12 J/TH. These new rigs are expected to begin shipping in Q4 2024.
“Mining stocks declined by a more modest 1.3%. The network hash rate fell by 1.3% to 574 EH/s, and network difficulty remained virtually unchanged at 83.7T. Hashprices dropped 7.2% to $0.05/TH/day due to lower BTC prices,” H.C. Wainwright wrote.