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This article first appeared in Miner Weekly, BlocksBridge Consulting’s weekly newsletter curating the latest news in bitcoin mining and data analysis from TheEnergyMag. Subscribe to receive in your inbox once a week.
Bitcoin’s network hashrate—a measure of bitcoin’s computing power—saw a moderate increase last month, averaging 780 EH/s. However, this did not lessen the competition among the largest mining forces.
In January, the five largest public mining companies – MARA (NASDAQ: MARA), CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CLSK), Cango (NYSE: CANG), Iris Energy, and Riot – mined 21.07% of the total bitcoin block rewards.
For comparison, in January 2024, the top five public miners by proprietary bitcoin production were MARA, Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ), Riot, CleanSpark, and Cipher Mining, collectively responsible for only 11.4% of total block rewards that month.
This increase in the combined market share of the top five public mining companies over the past year highlights industry-wide consolidation following the bear market and the new reality of ever-difficult bitcoin mining.
In fact, their combined market share was even higher at 21.84% in December before declining in January, despite their efforts to expand their combined hashrate capacity from 186.8 EH/s at the end of 2024 to 189.8 EH/s as of January 31, 2025.
The decline was due to curtailment activities aimed at stabilizing the grid during extreme weather conditions, contributing to a previous drop in difficulty. Some major public mining companies only achieved about 80% of their deployed hashrate capacity. MARA reported an energized capacity of 53 EH/s in January, yet its bitcoin production of 750 BTC indicated a realized hashrate of only 41 EH/s.
This dynamic intensified competition further among the top mining companies in January, with MARA’s decline and Riot’s catch-up, while CleanSpark, Cango, and Iris Energy maintained steady uptime.
According to TheEnergyMag’s Realized Hashrate metric, MARA dropped to the low 40 EH/s range in January, while CleanSpark, Cango, Riot, and Iris Energy competed closely in the 30 EH/s range. Iris Energy took a big leap in December, increasing its realized hashrate from 19.70 EH/s to 28.06 EH/s within a month, and closed out the year with 31 EH/s in deployed capacity. It will be interesting to see how they improve uptime as weather conditions recover in February.
Jun 4, 2026
