From electricity to bitcoin
Bitcoin mining is the industrial process that secures the Bitcoin network and the value circulating across it. In large data centres, specialised machines compete to add the next block of transactions to the ledger, and the winner is paid in newly created bitcoin plus fees. Strip away the cryptography and what remains is an energy business: revenue is denominated in bitcoin, costs are denominated in electricity. Miners locate wherever power is cheap and reliable, with the United States hosting around 38% of global capacity,1 and they have become useful partners for grids, curtailing consumption within seconds when household demand peaks.
Why equities, rather than the coin itself
For many European advisers, the practical obstacle to bitcoin is not conviction but structure. Single-asset bitcoin ETPs sit outside the UCITS framework, because UCITS rules require diversification a one-commodity product cannot meet.2
Equities are the traditional answer to this kind of problem. Mining companies are listed on public markets, publish audited accounts, hold earnings calls and trade with daily liquidity. They can be bought through any brokerage account and analysed the way advisers already analyse thematic or infrastructure equities: costs, margins, capital discipline, customers. A fund of listed mining shares is UCITS-eligible in a way bitcoin itself is not.
What actually drives the shares
Three variables set miner revenue: the bitcoin price, the level of network competition, and transaction fees. The industry folds them into one number, hashprice, the daily revenue per unit of computing power, currently near multi-year lows around $30 per petahash per day.3 Costs are set by electricity prices and hardware efficiency, and the gap between operators is wide: recent sector estimates put average cash costs near $80,000 per bitcoin produced, ranging from under $50,000 for the most efficient to well above $100,000.4
This cost structure creates operating leverage. When bitcoin rises before mining competition catches up, margins expand faster than the asset itself; listed miners have historically outperformed bitcoin in rallies and underperformed in drawdowns.5 The amplification works in both directions, and it is the core of the investment case: a higher risk/return profile than bitcoin, routed through real industrial assets. A second dynamic is now layered on top: miners have signed more than $110B of AI and high-performance computing contracts,6 renting their power and data centres to technology companies and adding a revenue stream independent of the bitcoin price.
Two routes to the theme
The CoinShares Bitcoin Mining UCITS ETF provides pure exposure to the mining industry, tracking the CoinShares Bitcoin Mining Index of listed mining companies.7 The methodology tilts towards operators lower on the cost curve, which is where the sector’s survivors tend to sit. It is the direct expression of the economics described above, amplification included. For investors who want the theme with less concentration, BLOCK offers broader blockchain equity exposure with lower volatility, though its performance remains meaningfully influenced by miners.
Who this is for
Mining equities suit investors who want bitcoin-linked exposure inside a familiar structure: an equity fund, a known regulatory wrapper. They are not a substitute for bitcoin, and they are not calm; the volatility is amplified, and position on the cost curve decides which operators survive a downturn. But for advisers whose clients ask about crypto and whose mandates answer in equities, the mining sector turns a novel asset into a question the industry already knows how to analyse.
Sources
1 Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Bitcoin Mining Map (latest available data).
2 UCITS Directive diversification requirements; single-asset ETPs are structured outside UCITS. CoinShares Research.
3 Hashrate Index, July 2026
4 CoinShares Bitcoin Mining Report, Q1 2026
5 CoinShares Research: historical relative performance of listed miners vs spot bitcoin across market cycles.
6 Bernstein analysis, reported by Decrypt, June 2026
7 CoinShares product documentation: CoinShares Bitcoin Mining UCITS ETF, benchmarked to the CoinShares Bitcoin Mining Index, administered by Solactive AG.