Miners are moving into AI: a week of massive bitcoin sell-offs and escalating cyber threats
The outgoing week was marked by a tectonic shift in the strategy of public miners: selling mined coins is no longer a survival measure but has become a deliberate step to finance the transition to artificial intelligence infrastructure. In parallel, the market faced an increase in cyberattacks using neural networks and a new round of regulatory pressure in Russia.
Bitcoin Pulled Back to August Lows
The July momentum has faded. On August 14, the leading cryptocurrency fell below the $63,000 mark, returning to levels seen at the start of the month. The week closed with a decline of 3.3%, although in the early days analysts pointed to resistance in the $67,000 and $72,000 zones, calculated based on the realized price of short-term holders.
Glassnode experts describe the market as "compressed": the asset is squeezed between the median realized price of $63,000 and the cost basis of short-term investors at $68,700. A break below the lower boundary, in their assessment, opens a direct path to $58,500. Pressure is amplified by outflows from spot Bitcoin ETFs, which totaled $398.7 million over the week—the largest figure since early July. Ethereum also slipped 2.1% to $1,880, with the only notable exception being the Hyperliquid token, which gained nearly 4.7%.
Miners Vote with Dollars for AI
The key trend of the week is an unprecedented pivot by mining giants. Former Bitfarms, now Keel Infrastructure, has fully decommissioned its U.S. capacity, preparing sites for data centers to handle AI workloads. Riot Platforms went through the entire cycle in a matter of days: signed a 20-year contract worth $9.1 billion with a leading AI lab, sold 4,300 BTC, and raised up to $573 million to build an AI campus in Texas.
The scale of the process is impressive: MARA sold 23,093 BTC for approximately $1.6 billion in the first half of the year, while Hyperscale Data sold 685 BTC to fund its own data center. The economics of mining explain this pivot: fee revenues have fallen to a decade low, and the realized hashrate of public companies has dropped by 21.2% over three quarters. This is not a crisis-driven sell-off but a structural transformation of the business model.
AI as a Weapon: Attacks Become Smarter
The week's events confirmed that neural networks have become a working tool on both sides of the barricades. South Korean analysts found that the North Korea-linked group Kimsuky is using local AI systems to attack crypto companies. Taiwanese government agencies revealed details of a hack using AI agents, and the creators of the Bitcoin service Boltz handed the project over to industry veterans after a series of similar attacks.
Notably, defenders face limitations: volunteers from Bitcoin Red Team lost access to OpenAI tools and were forced to return to Chinese models. Meanwhile, the July campaign against Coldcard hardware wallets has ended: at least 1,777.84 BTC ($112.7 million) was stolen from vulnerable devices, with no new incidents recorded after August 6. Separately, I note data leaks at Trezor and SafePal—reputational losses for manufacturers are becoming systemic.
Regulatory Pressure in Russia
Moscow law enforcement conducted mass searches at "Gorbushka" in a case involving crypto exchangers, coinciding with stricter bank compliance. Major banks have begun requiring legal entities to confirm that counterparties are included in the Central Bank's registry of digital currency exchange operators—a registry that does not yet exist. This is the logic of credit institutions self-insuring rather than a direct instruction from the regulator, but the uncertainty will not last long: the "Digital Currency" law takes effect on September 1.
Against this backdrop, a positive signal came from institutional players: Israel's largest bank is launching Bitcoin trading through a partnership with Galaxy Digital, and Norway's sovereign wealth fund disclosed a stake in BitMine worth $81.9 million. At the same time, the likelihood of the Clarity Act passing is estimated at only 10%—the legislative track is clearly stalling.
My view: the miners' pivot toward AI is not a temporary market condition but a sign of market maturity, where mining as a standalone business loses appeal without diversification. For Bitcoin, this means increased price pressure in the short term, but it simultaneously strengthens the long-term narrative of hashrate moving into the hands of efficient players.