Recent data has shown a sharp increase in the amount of bitcoin miners are moving from mining pools to cryptocurrency exchanges, but the price of the flagship cryptocurrency continues to show resilience. On Friday, miners sold off at the highest level since March 2019, according to blockchain data firm Glassnode. Selling jumped to the highest level since September 2017 on the day BlackRock filed to launch a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund. The sell-off began at the end of May and was hinted at by miners moving mined bitcoin to exchanges. Miners are still recovering from Bitcoin’s brutal sell-off in 2022, when the cryptocurrency fell 65%, sapping their profitability. While Bitcoin has struggled at the $30,000 level after a sharp start to the year, it is still up about 85% in 2023, leading many miners to dump their holdings to raise cash to fund their operations. “When bitcoin was at $30,000, some miners were selling everything they produced because they were either trying to pay off their debt or they were trying to put a little cash on their balance sheet so they could buy more miners and expand because We have the halving coming next May,” said Fred Thiel, chief executive of mining company Marathon Digital. “For many miners, the only way they can raise capital or any liquidity is by selling bitcoin.” He added that many miners sold most of their inventory in the spring and are now selling all the bitcoin they produced, just In order to accumulate cash on the balance sheet. A report by Standard Chartered Bank on Monday estimated that the 12 largest publicly traded miners sold 106% of mined bitcoin in the first quarter of this year, including inventory. The report found that the figures for the second quarter will be slightly lower, just below 100%. Standard Chartered said the 12 companies accounted for 20% of all bitcoin mining. Roughly 900 bitcoins are mined every day, and the typical daily volume of the flagship cryptocurrency is between $7 billion and $10 billion, meaning miners can sell 100% of what they produce today and it won’t affect the price of bitcoin . There are a lot of bitcoins, Thiel said. The average cost for a miner to produce a bitcoin is about $17,000. However, Thiel said that the miner sell-off will not have a major impact on the price of Bitcoin. “Bitcoin miners have fairly fixed operating costs, which means you pay a fixed price for electricity — that’s what drives the marginal cost of production,” he said. “If the price of bitcoin goes up 60 percent, you can sell 40 percent less bitcoin and still have the same dollars in your pocket at the end of the month to pay for your electricity bills,” Thiel explained in preparation for the halving. Bitcoin is a market-moving event that occurs roughly every four years and tends to drive a significant increase in the price of Bitcoin, expected in the spring of 2024, and thus, a race to add more computing power to miners. This computing power is called hash rate. Bitcoin’s hash rate hit an all-time high on Saturday, according to Glassnode. If miners want to start getting a return on their investment, they need to accelerate the development of facilities and capacity. If they don’t add more computing power by May 2024, it will take twice as long to generate returns, Thiel said. “It’s really about producing as much as you can now and then cashing out as much as you can to maximize your balance sheet,” he said. Only a few months.