Written by: Eric, Foresight News
On January 16, 2026, Canaan Inc. announced that it received a notification from the Nasdaq Stock Exchange on January 14. The notification indicated that Canaan was warned because its stock price had closed below $1 for the past 30 trading days. According to Nasdaq listing rules, if Canaan cannot bring its stock price back to $1 or above within 180 days (by July 13, 2026), it may face delisting.
Canaan stated that if necessary, the company would implement a reverse stock split to meet the price requirement. A reverse stock split is an operation that reduces the total number of shares by consolidating existing shares, thereby increasing the price per share. The author reached out to Canaan regarding the warning but had not received a response by the time of publication.
This is the second time Canaan has received a delisting warning in the past year, the first being in May 2025. Subsequently, due to the rise in Bitcoin prices, the stock price exceeded $1, alleviating the crisis. However, the overall sluggishness of the cryptocurrency market in recent months has caused Canaan's stock price to drop nearly 30% over the past 30 trading days.
On December 13, 2025, Kindly MD, a Bitcoin treasury company, received a warning for the same reason, while Windtree Therapeutics, another treasury company, was delisted in August 2025. Unlike cryptocurrency treasury companies, Canaan, as one of the leading Bitcoin mining machine manufacturers, finds its current situation somewhat lamentable.
Canaan went public on Nasdaq in November 2019, becoming the world's first pure blockchain concept company to complete an IPO. After going public, Canaan's stock price remained below its initial offering price for over a year, but with the arrival of the cryptocurrency bull market, its stock price began to recover steadily from the end of 2020, reaching a historical high of nearly $40 in March 2021, with a market capitalization exceeding $5 billion.
However, the good times did not last long. With the issuance of domestic mining bans and the bear market that persisted throughout 2022, Canaan's stock price continued to decline, returning to pre-bull market levels. In this cycle, although Bitcoin prices reached new highs, even nearly doubling the peak price of 2021, Canaan's stock price fell instead of rising, and in April 2024, it first dropped below $1.
The poor performance in the capital market, aside from objective market reasons, is also a trigger related to the industry and Canaan itself.
In the Bitcoin mining machine market, Bitmain is the absolute leader, and Canaan held the second position until 2021. However, after 2021, MicroBT rapidly rose with a higher power efficiency ratio, pushing Canaan to third place. According to a report released by Intel Market Research in December 2025, MicroBT's market share is between 15% and 20%, while Canaan's is between 10% and 15%.
Canaan's annual reports from 2021 to 2024 show that its net profit has continuously declined, from over $300 million in 2021 to a loss of nearly $250 million in 2024. The reasons for this include the bear market in 2022, which led to a backlog of inventory and continuous impairment affecting profits; on the other hand, fierce competition has kept R&D expenses and operating costs high, while market share has not seen effective improvement.
Under multiple blows, the sharp decline in demand became the last straw that broke the camel's back. According to MSX researcher Frank's analysis, the over-leveraged expectations of Bitcoin mining narratives and visible intensifying competition have led many Bitcoin mining companies to pivot to AI computing infrastructure. Although "selling shovels" has always been a good business model, in the current capital market, the story of Bitcoin is clearly not as certain as that of AI, and funds naturally vote with their feet, turning to AI-related companies.
In fact, Canaan began developing AI chips nearly a decade ago, launching its first commercial edge AI chip, Kendryte K210, based on the RISC-V architecture in 2018. This chip is mainly used for edge computing, supporting AI vision and audio processing. Over the next six years, Canaan released three chips, each featuring significant innovations over the previous generation.
Although the chips launched by Canaan have technical highlights and were "early to the game," compared to giants like Nvidia and Intel, Canaan lacks ecosystem support and large-scale demand. In 2024, its AI-related business revenue was only about $900,000, while operating expenses accounted for 15% of the entire company. In June 2025, Canaan announced the cessation of its non-core AI semiconductor business and the closure of its AI chip department. In its related announcement, the company stated that it had been exploring the sale of its AI business since March 2022 but had not found a buyer, ultimately deciding to abandon it to focus on cryptocurrency mining machines and the North American market.
Canaan is a microcosm of the "real business" in the Web3 industry. Another publicly listed Bitcoin mining machine manufacturer, Ebang International, has seen its stock price drop from nearly $450 at its peak in 2020 to around $3, a decline of over 99%. For hardware manufacturers, there is a very mature and fixed valuation model, and if the industry they are in lacks clear growth prospects, it is easy to fall into a vicious cycle.
On the positive side, at the end of 2025, Canaan signed a large order of 4.5 MV in October and completed a $72 million financing in November. Clearly, there are still people in the market who believe that the once "Pumpkin Zhang" can overcome its difficulties, but to break free from the predicament, Canaan may need a new story.
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