Please note that VanEck has exposure to bitcoin.

Three key takeaways for mid-August – mid-September:

• Institutions Scoop Up Bitcoin, But DATs Underperform: While ETPs and Digital Asset Treasuries (“DATs”) continue to add Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, other crypto equities are stealing the show.
• Bitcoin Miners Receive AI Re-Ratings: Surging AI/HPC deals are de-risking Bitcoin miners’ pivots into AI/HPC hosting and cloud services, resulting in a dispersion in price performance and valuation multiples.
• Not All Miners Are Equal: Wide gaps across power assets, BTC treasuries, and AI/HPC strategies suggest a stock-picker’s market in the sector.

Chart of the Month

Corporate Treasuries Widen Their Lead as Bitcoin's Marginal Buyer As Maximum Supply Approaches

Source: Glassnode as of 9/11/2025. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein.

Over the past year, corporations have added over 709K BTC (~$83bn) . In total, over 290 companies now own $163B+ in Bitcoin. With only 270K BTC mined over the same period, the current rate of corporate demand outpaces Bitcoin production by a factor of ~4.3x . After including ETPs, other funds, and government holdings, total institutional demand outpaces production by a factor of ~6.7x .

Institutions’ accelerating purchases suggests their growing appreciation of Bitcoin’s disinflationary supply, which gives it its unique store-of-value property. Between now and the next halving expected in April 2028, only ~0.43M bitcoin will be mined. That halving cycle (2028-2032) will yield a total of only ~0.33M bitcoins. Thereafter, only a final ~0.33M Bitcoins will ever be mined over the next 100+ years.

Bitcoin ChainCheck Monthly Dashboard and Highlights

^* DAPP market cap as a proxy, as of September 17th, 2025. "All-time" data as of 6.8.23, not since index inception.

¹ 30 day change & 365 day change are relative to the 30-day avg, not absolute.

Source: Glassnode as of 9/17/2025. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein.

Bitcoin Price & Market Sentiment

Bitcoin traded down 4% this month as its 3-month annualized volatility fell to 29% , the lowest level in over five years. Bitcoin dominance, a measure of Bitcoin’s share of the total market cap of cryptocurrencies, also fell 4% this month, reversing most of the metric’s gains in 2025. Despite Digital Asset Treasuries’ (“DATs”) impressive YoY accumulation, they have slowed relative to newcomer DATs that are focused on other tokens like Ethereum and Solana.

Rising Share of Supply Held in Digital Asset Treasuries

Source: Artemis XYZ as of 9/17/2025. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein.

While BTC DATs increased their share of BTC by 2.5% over the past month, ETH and SOL DATs played catch-up. SOL DATs grew their share of SOL supply by 18% MoM, while ETH DATs collectively added 83% . These purchases helped drive up their tokens’ price ratios versus BTC, with ETH/BTC + 2.3% and SOL/BTC + 25.6% . Similarly, BTC ETPs saw net inflows of $2.2B over the past month, representing 0.09% of its market cap, while ETH ETPs saw $853M of net inflows, representing 0.16% of its market cap. As institutionalization plays an increasing role in crypto, we believe these trends are paving the way for so-called “altcoin seasons” to play out in public markets.

Crypto Equities Market Cap : The 30-day moving average (30DMA) of MVIS ^® Global Digital Assets Equity Index (MVDAPP) fell 6% month-over-month as major Bitcoin “pure-play” components like MSTR and MARA fell following Bitcoin’s late summer highs. However, the index has gone on to set new cycle highs over the past week. Crypto equities are showing market dispersion as the AI/HPC trade heats up, driving outperformance from a growing number of Bitcoin miners that are pivoting to AI while DATs and more pure-play miners lag.

AI-Pivoting Miners Outperform as Pure-Play Miners and DATs Lag Bitcoin

^* CORZ excluded due to pending stock-based merger with CRWV.

Source: Company filings, FactSet as of 9/16/2025. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein.

Over the past month, Bitcoin mining stocks with clear AI/HPC pivots gained an average of 57% , adding ~$16B to their collective market capitalization. Over the past three months, this cohort achieved a cumulative average gain of 126% , outperforming Bitcoin (+9%) , pure-play miners (+4%) , and Bitcoin DATs (-38%) . The move marks an accelerating trend of miners being re-rated for the value of their scarce power assets, as AI-focused enterprises like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and AI neoclouds like CoreWeave escalate their capital expenditures to meet demand for AI capacity.

On September 9th, Nebius Group (NBIS) secured a landmark deal with Microsoft, adding $17.4-$19.4B in revenues over five years to provide Microsoft Azure with expanded infrastructure capacity to NVIDIA’s latest AI hardware. Microsoft noted in its Q2 earnings call that its Intelligent Cloud segment showed the greatest growth, at 26% , compared to 16% growth from its Productivity and Business Processes segment and 9% growth in Personal Computing. In total, Microsoft’s capex grew ~$24B (27%) year-over-year to support demand for its cloud and AI offerings. Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella stated that “Cloud and AI is the driving force of business transformation across every industry and sector.” Though NBIS is not a Bitcoin miner, by highlighting AI’s power capacity bottleneck, the deal helped catalyze a cascade of re-ratings across the hybrid Bitcoin-miner-to-AI-data-center landscape. Underscoring the strategic importance of power, NBIS’s Q2 2025 highlights the company’s emphasis on growing capacity from 220MW in 2025 to 1>GW in 2026. Announced on September 10th, OpenAI’s $300B , 5-year computing power deal with Oracle further added fuel to the fire, one of the largest cloud contracts ever signed.

Miners With Colocation Deals Have Already Pivoted Over Half Their MW Capacity

^* Based on an est. average Power Usage Effectiveness (“PUE”) ratio of 1.25.

Source: Company filings as of 9/16/2025. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein.

Among the four Bitcoin miners with AI colocation deals, we estimate ~61% of their capacity has already been pivoted to AI workloads. Most recently, Applied Digital announced on August 29th that it had finalized a new lease agreement for an additional 150MW at its Polaris Forge 1 Campus in Ellendale, North Dakota, adding ~$4B in contracted lease revenue over 15 years. In total, the deal brings APLD’s total anticipated contracted lease revenue to approximately $11B . In August, TeraWulf contracted 360+ MW of critical IT load to AI cloud platform Fluidstack in a deal representing $6.7B in contracted revenue over the initial 10-year term, including two five-year extension options that, if exercised, would bring the total to $16B . As a strategic partner, Google is providing a $3.2B backstop in project-related debt financing and will receive warrants for 32.5M shares of WULF, representing ~14% pro forma equity ownership in TeraWulf. As competition over power assets continues to underscore their value, Two Seas Capital, which owns 6.3% of Core Scientific, reiterated its opposition to the company’s pending merger with CoreWeave in a proxy filing dated September 4th. Even as AI valuations surge, Two Seas argues that the all-stock deal structure undervalued Core Scientific from the start. The merger valued CORZ at $20.40 per share (~$6.2B) , which was already a 39% discount to the $10.2B of pre-renewal hosting contracts it held with CoreWeave. The situation worsened as CoreWeave’s stock declined, dragging the implied value of CORZ below $12 per share as of September 3. Two Seas calls this “a take-under” and deems it indefensible.

But Bitcoin miners are not being re-rated purely on their potential to provide colocation deals. Some miners are leaning into the more lucrative but capex-heavy business of owning and operating the GPUs themselves. In late August, IREN announced securing $102M in financing for a prior purchase of NVIDIA Blackwell B200 and B300 GPUs, structured as a 36-month lease for 100% of the purchase price for an estimated 9% interest rate. Days later, the company secured NVIDIA Preferred Partner status and receiving an additional $96M in financing to procure an additional 1.2k air-cooled B300s and 1.2k liquid-cooled GB300s for $168M , expanding its total GPU fleet to 10.9k NVIDIA GPUs, a 474% increase from the company’s ~1.9k operational GPUs in July. Similarly, HIVE’s Buzz HPC struck a deal with Bell Canada, the country’s largest telecommunications provider, to provide the NVIDIA GPU clusters to Bell’s government and enterprise customers, though the terms of the deal remain undisclosed. BTDR, another miner with multi-GW capacity in search of colocation customers, also expanded its neocloud business to $8M ARR in July, with “significant growth expected from Q4” as compared to “immaterial” AI Cloud Service ARR as of its April annual filing. We believe that with capital markets now offering single-digit financing for GPUs, Bitcoin miners with proven expertise in operating their own cloud AI services can drive better margins by being more vertically integrated and thus having greater negotiating leverage with colocation tenants.

WULF, CIFR, and RIOT Start to Trade Like AI Data Centers, While Other Pivoters Remain Overlooked

Source: Company filings, Bloomberg as of 9/17/2025. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities named herein.

Surveying the Bitcoin miner landscape, there is a clear valuation dispersion between miners that have been exploring AI/HPC for over a year and those who have remained mostly pure-plays. To more accurately measure each miners’ core operating businesses versus their 2026 EBITDA estimates, we calculate “BTC-Adjusted EV” by subtracting the value of each company’s BTC holdings from EV. We noted earlier this year that the value of BTC treasuries is not accounted for by most data providers like Bloomberg, a dynamic that disproportionately affects relatively BTC-heavy companies like MARA, CLSK, and RIOT.

With 430MW in contracted, WULF is the only miner in this list with a colocation deal, trading firmly within the AI/HPC data center EV/EBITDA multiple range at 24.2x . CIFR, trading at 19.9x hasn’t closed a deal, but has 300MW of interconnect capacity at its Barber Lake, TX site, with a signed MOU for an additional 500MW data center at the same site. Earlier in September, CIFR’s CEO stated at the H.C. Wainwright conference that he is confident the company will have at least one deal by the end of 2025. At 15.6x, RIOT’s valuation reflects its 600MW of remaining capacity at Corsicana, a site in close proximity to Dallas, where they first began formally evaluating potential AI/HPC colocation deals in January. Similarly, HUT, IREN, BITF, and BTDR have all explicitly announced that they are pursuing colocation deals with hundreds of megawatts each. While MARA and CLSK have historically led pure-play miners with their dominant hashrate and Bitcoin treasuries, and have been skeptics of the AI/HPC pivot, they have taken recent steps toward AI/HPC as well. CLSK saw an 18% gain after its newly returned CEO Matt Schultz messaged on Schwab Network that they were well-positioned to pivot some of their 1GW+ of power assets into “other types of compute to maximize profitability.” In August, MARA signed an agreement with an option to acquire a 64%-75% stake in Exaion, a developer and operator of HPC data centers and cloud AI infrastructure. Overall, we think that as global AI/HPC capex continues to climb, the growing success of miner pivots will de-risk the miner pivot trade, or even demand it for shareholder value. Thanks to the synergies between Bitcoin and I, miners’ involvement in AI/HPC is turning from a binary “yes” or “no” to a question of “how much” power they are capable of monetizing, and how.

Through this lens, we think HIVE looks particularly undervalued. We conservatively assume that HIVE can earn 40% EBITDA margins (IREN earns ~60% ) on its estimated $550M ARR from mining once it completes its EH/s expansion in Paraguay, slated for completion by Thanksgiving, for a total of $220M EBITDA. We further assume HIVE can earn 70% EBITDA margins on their $ 100M ARR cloud HPC target for 2026, totaling $70M EBITDA. Thus, HIVE’s $369M BTC-Adjusted EV / $290M EBITDA target implies 1.3x EV/EBITDA, almost half the 2.4x EV/EBITDA implied by the Bloomberg estimates we used for the BTC-Adjusted EV / EBITDA graph above. We partially attribute HIVE’s potential undervaluation to its relatively small enterprise value and sizable BTC stack, which tends to be overlooked by traditional financial data providers.

Source: Company filings, Bitcoin Treasuries, Bloomberg as of 9/17/2025. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

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