The people shaping Bitcoin mining

ASIC hardware volume and liquidity

Luxor’s ASIC Trading Desk manages high-volume hardware transactions to counter market volatility. The desk traded $177 million in hardware during 2023, which averaged $480,000 per day. This is 13.7 EH/s of the annual hashrate growth. In December 2024, Luxor entered a $93.2 million purchase agreement with MicroBT for WhatsMiner ASICs, with an option to acquire an additional $38.2 million in hardware. This transaction follows the October $340 million pre-order volume and the Antminer S21 Pro delivery squeeze. Luxor is a liquid counterparty in the ASIC trading industry. The firm’s open auction marketplace allows traders to place buy and sell orders with industry-leading pricing.

Product Type	Target User	Key Feature
Deliverable Forward	Miners	Upfront notional financing
Non-Deliverable Forward	Institutional Traders	Fixed BTC-denominated returns
Hash-rate Derivative	Miners and Investors	Exposure to difficulty trends

Financial engineering for miners

Miners use financial tools to manage the volatility of Bitcoin rewards. When the network hashrate increases, the reward per terahash falls, which creates a natural revenue squeeze. Luxor’s derivatives desk uses Hashrate Index data to manage this risk. The firm provides Deliverable Forward Contracts that give miners notional payments upfront for financing. When traders pair these Deliverable Forward contracts with Non-Deliverable Forward contracts, they gain fixed BTC-denominated returns that remain unavailable to retail participants while providing institutional traders with necessary hedging tools. Luxor also holds approval from the NFA and CFTC to act as an Introducing Broker. This designation allows the firm to extend hedging products to include exchange-listed Bitcoin and energy derivatives like futures and options.

The Hashrate Index provides API access to clearing prices for ASICs and forward estimates on mining metrics. It also produces reports on mining stocks and infrastructure appraisals for 10Ks. Subscriptions to the free mining newsletter grew by 68% to 13,000 readers in 2023.

The energy problem and the AI pivot

Profitability depends on the balance between Bitcoin price and electricity costs. At a Bitcoin price of $75,000 and $0.06 per kilowatt-hour, the Antminer S21 XP Hydro uses 5,676 watts and produces 473 TH/s. For this machine, electricity accounts for 52% of revenue. Older models like the Antminer S19 Pro or Avalon A1366 face much harder math. These machines show electricity cost rates between 109% and 162% of revenue at that same price point. The revenue compression created a brutal reality for operators as machines were forced offline. This is a drop from the $39 per PH/s recorded by Luxor’s Hashrate Index only months prior, as f2pool reported daily revenue of $34 per PH/s. You should realize that hardware efficiency alone cannot solve this if power is too expensive.

The redirection of power to AI compute threatens the security of the network. Companies like CoreWeave secured a $2 billion investment from Nvidia and sought to acquire Core Scientific in 2025 to gain access to power contracts. Hut 8 signed a 15-year, 245-megawatt AI data center lease at its River Bend campus. These moves reallocate power from Bitcoin mining to GPU-based workloads. Will the redirection of power to AI compute permanently weaken the Bitcoin security budget?

2026 tax rules and hashrate predictions

The 2026 U.S. tax code includes a 100% bonus depreciation rule. Dr. Jeff Ross predicts this will cause hashrate to skyrocket because miners will buy equipment to shield profits. He expects some miners to pay zero taxes through the coming years. However, Bob Burnett argues that the energy supply is the real constraint. He points to the years-long backlog for grid interconnection in Texas as proof that capital cannot replace energized transformers.

Luxor’s mining pool expanded to 16.9 EH/s by the end of 2023, which is 73% growth. The pool mined 1,633 blocks, totaling 10,939 Bitcoin and $326 million in USD value. The company uses LuxOS firmware to manage these operations. LuxOS provides fine-grained control and real-time telemetry. Users report that LuxOS increases hashashrate by 10-15% without additional hardware.