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Bitcoin (BTC) mining stocks rallied in January despite softer BTC prices: JPMorgan

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Bitcoin (BTC) mining stocks rallied in January despite softer BTC prices: JPMorgan

Bitcoin mining stocks kicked off 2026 on a strong note, buoyed by falling network competition and fresh enthusiasm around high-performance computing (HPC), Wall Street bank JPMorgan said in the Monday report.

The bank noted that the 14 U.S.-listed bitcoin miners and data center operators it tracks ended last month with a combined market capitalization of $60 billion, up 23% month over month, far outpacing the S&P 500’s 1% gain.

The rally was helped in part by news that Riot Platforms signed a HPC agreement with AMD at its 700-megawatt Rockdale facility, underscoring miners’ push to diversify beyond bitcoin.

Facing record-low margins after the 2024 halving, bitcoin miners are repositioning as digital infrastructure providers, repurposing power-dense mining sites into AI-ready data centers in search of steadier, long-term revenue.

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At the same time, valuations continued to stretch. Analysts Reginald Smith and Charles Pearce said mining stocks were trading at roughly 150% of the four-year block reward opportunity at year-end, about three times the post-2022 average, highlighting a growing disconnect between miner valuations and bitcoin’s price.

Operationally, January brought relief. Winter storms across the U.S. forced widespread curtailments, dragging the average network hashrate down 6% month over month to 981 exahashes per second (EH/s), JPMorgan said. The hashrate briefly dipped as low as 700 EH/s during the month, while mining difficulty fell 5% from December and sat 10% below November’s all-time high.

The hashrate refers to the total combined computational power used to mine and process transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain, and is a proxy for competition in the industry and mining difficulty. It is measured in exahashes per second.

That drop in competition helped offset weaker bitcoin prices. The analysts estimated miners earned about $42,350 per EH/s in daily block reward revenue in January, up slightly from December, while gross profit jumped 24% to roughly $21,200 per EH/s as network efficiency improved. Still, profitability remains well below pre-halving levels, the bank noted.

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Stock performance was broadly positive. Twelve of the 14 miners tracked by the bank outperformed bitcoin’s 4% decline in January, with IREN (IREN) rising 42% and Cango (CANG) falling 18%. Even after the rally, the group’s combined valuation remains about 15% below October 2025 highs.

Read more: Bitcoin miners HIVE, Bitfarm and Bitdeer downgraded as analyst warns on AI shift

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Crypto World

SEC Chair Paul Atkins Floats ‘Safe Harbor’ Exemptions for Crypto

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🚨

The SEC just gave crypto its biggest regulatory green light in years.

Chair Paul Atkins floated a safe harbor exemption on March 18 that lets crypto projects operate without immediate securities registration. It is a direct reversal of the regulation by enforcement era that suffocated US-based development for years.

Token projects now have a compliant runway to decentralize without the threat of an SEC lawsuit hanging over them. For altcoin valuations, that changes the math entirely.x

Key Takeaways:
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  • Atkins identified four asset categories—digital commodities, collectibles, tools, and payment stablecoins—that are not subject to securities laws.
  • The safe harbor proposal offers a specific grace period for projects to reach decentralization without facing enforcement actions.
  • Formal rulemaking is expected within weeks to replace temporary staff guidance and solidify these protections.

The Safe Harbor Framework Explained

Atkins is cutting through a decade of deliberate ambiguity.

Speaking at a Digital Chamber event, he laid out a framework that separates capital raising from the underlying asset. Four categories are now explicitly excluded from securities jurisdiction. Digital commodities, digital collectibles, digital tools, and payment stablecoins.

For everything that does not fit cleanly into those boxes yet, the safe harbor buys time. Instead of Wells Notices for technically failing the Howey Test during development, projects face purpose-fit disclosures and a transparent path toward decentralization. Build first. Comply as you go.

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Custody rules are also getting overhauled. Broker-dealers will be able to hold both crypto assets and traditional securities simultaneously. The special purpose broker-dealer model that no compliant firm could actually use is effectively dead.

Atkins is trying to bring crypto trading back to national securities exchanges and stabilize a market that has been hammered by legal uncertainty for years. Assets like XRP have historically exploded the moment regulatory clouds clear.

Those clouds are clearing fast.

Market Implications for Issuers and Exchanges

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The immediate winners are US-based token issuers and exchanges.

Coinbase has operated for years under the threat that any listing could trigger a lawsuit. A formal safe harbor removes that existential risk entirely. That clarity is the missing piece institutional product approvals have been waiting for.

The ETF race is the most direct beneficiary. Solana’s push for a spot ETF has faced headwinds specifically because the SEC previously labeled SOL a security. If SOL lands in the digital commodity or digital tool bucket under Atkins’ new classification, the path to approval gets significantly shorter overnight.

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The broader impact is a sector-wide repricing. Token prices have been trading at a discount for years to account for enforcement risk. Remove that discount and valuations adjust upward across the board.

The cost of capital just dropped for the entire industry.

Discover: The best new crypto in the world

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Crypto Cards Aren’t The Future, But Onchain Credit Is

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Crypto Cards Aren't The Future, But Onchain Credit Is

Opinion by: Vikram Arun, co-founder and CEO of Superform

Crypto cards aren’t the future of payments. They’re a temporary interface for a world that hasn’t fully accepted cryptocurrencies.

They rely on banks as issuers, Visa or Mastercard as gatekeepers, and compliance rules that look exactly like TradFi. 

In most cases, crypto is sold into idle USD, the assets stop earning and every swipe creates a taxable event. 

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That’s not innovation. That’s a debit card with extra steps. 

As digital banks built with blockchain rails scale, crypto cards that behave like debit cards will become obsolete, replaced by systems that treat cards as a thin interface on top of robust onchain credit.

The problem with current crypto cards

To understand why this shift is necessary, consider what happens with current crypto cards. When systems force users to liquidate holdings to spend, they reinforce the paradigm crypto was meant to escape: the false choice between liquidity and ownership. 

Debit-style crypto cards recreate this same trade-off because they require assets to become spendable balances, which halts yield and makes the system structurally negative-sum without subsidies. 

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The IRS treats converting cryptocurrency to fiat currency as a taxable disposal, meaning each coffee purchase triggers capital gains reporting and permanently removes assets from productive use. Card issuers typically earn 1% to 3%, plus a flat fee per transaction, from interchange fees. The infrastructure looks decentralized on the surface, but the dependencies run deep.

Onchain credit fixes these issues

Instead of selling assets to spend, onchain credit enables people to deposit yield-bearing assets, open a credit line and spend against it. When people swipe the card, their debt increases, but their assets keep earning. Nothing is sold unless the person fails to repay. If the position falls below governance-defined parameters, liquidation is deterministic and transparent. This shift toward wallet-native credit shows onchain credit moving from concept to practice. 

In this model, spending doesn’t reduce ownership; it increases debt. Collateral continues to compound until the credit line is repaid or liquidated. There are no forced conversions and no idle balances. Yield-bearing stablecoins currently offer about 5% yield, and DeFi protocols range from 5% to 12%, depending on demand and token incentives.

Users holding these assets in credit accounts keep earning while maintaining spending power.

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Any earning asset can be collateral

This shift from debit to credit fundamentally changes what’s possible. Once credit becomes the primary primitive, the question stops being “what can I spend?” and becomes “what can safely secure my credit?” Eligibility is no longer about whether an asset can be instantly liquidated into cash. It’s about whether it can be priced continuously, risk bounded and unwound deterministically.

This allows productive assets to compete for inclusion. Vault shares, yield-bearing dollars, US Treasury-backed assets and strategy positions are first-class collateral that don’t need to be converted into idle balances. These assets remain productive until liquidation becomes required. When assets keep earning, users don’t have to choose between liquidity and yield, credit lines become cheaper to maintain and protocols earn from management and performance, not interest spreads.

The card is just an interface

The card is not the product. A card is simply a consumer-facing compatibility layer, a thin authorization surface, and not the source of truth. What actually matters is the credit line itself: the ability to price a user’s onchain balance sheet and decide, in real time, whether a spend should be allowed.

Related: Visa crypto card spending soars 525 percent in 2025

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Cards serve merchants and consumers. Once credit is the primitive, however, interfaces become interchangeable. Software and autonomous agents can already request payment programmatically. Whether through cards or APIs, the underlying question is the same: Is this spend authorized against the user’s credit?

If credit logic lives within the card, people remain locked into interchange fee structures, closed payment rails and rigid KYC requirements. If credit lives onchain, cards become optional. Collateral stays in user-controlled accounts, spending is authorized in real time and liquidation is deterministic. 

Managing risk through transparency

Of course, this system raises questions about safety. The most immediate objection is volatility. If collateral can fluctuate in value, what protects people from being liquidated while they are buying groceries?

Governance sets conservative loan-to-value ratios in advance, ensuring users can only borrow against a fraction of their collateral. As collateral earns yield, this buffer grows automatically. Pricing happens continuously, not at arbitrary intervals, and liquidation triggers are transparent from the beginning.

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Traditional credit obscures risk through adjustable interest rates, surprise fees and terms buried in legal documents. Onchain credit makes risk explicit. Governance-set parameters mean the community decides what’s acceptable, not a bank’s risk committee behind closed doors.

The path forward

The answer to managing this risk lies in how the system is governed. Governance controls which assets can be used as collateral, how they’re priced, acceptable risk levels and when liquidations occur. People opt in by depositing collateral, and from that point on, the protocol enforces the rules without blanket access to funds or quietly changed parameters.

Crypto cards will not disappear because they failed. They will disappear because they succeeded by bridging crypto into a world that still runs on legacy rails. As wallets improve and crypto-native payments become standard, spending won’t require banks, issuers or card networks at all. Interfaces will change. Payment rails will evolve. But onchain credit will remain: the ability to spend without selling, to keep assets productive and to enforce risk transparently.

Cards are an interface. Credit is the system.

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Opinion by: Vikram Arun, co-founder and CEO of Superform.