Bitcoin Miners Had a $2 Billion Ghost Seller, Citadel Just Cleared It
Bitcoin miner shares have spent three weeks buying and selling with a vendor sitting on high of them. On Friday, Ken Griffin mentioned that vendor is sort of completed.
Griffin advised Citadel purchasers the agency has unwound greater than 80% of the danger it absorbed from Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness portfolio. The filings behind that guide present miner bets that grew in {dollars} whereas shrinking to below 10% of the portfolio. The fund was shopping for miners quick and reminiscence chips sooner.
The Seller Nobody Was Watching
Situational Awareness is the bogus intelligence (AI) fund run by former OpenAI researcher Aschenbrenner. It gained 439% within the first half of 2026. Then July arrived.
Leveraged 4 to 1, the fund misplaced 67% in a single month and handed roughly $10 billion of inventory to Citadel on July 30, as BeInCrypto reported when it lost its stock book.
Its final submitting earlier than that sale is the one which issues. The 13F, a quarterly holdings report massive traders should file with regulators, lined the interval to June 30 and was lodged on August 14. It listed a $20.24 billion portfolio throughout simply 26 positions.
Bitcoin miners made up $1.99 billion of it. Core Scientific was the most important at $666 million. Riot Platforms held $468 million, IREN $433 million and CleanSpark $179 million. A recent $152 million stake sat in Keel Infrastructure, the corporate Bitfarms grew to become after rebranding in April.
Those positions grew quick. Miner publicity climbed 79% in a single quarter. Riot alone jumped 229%.
Why the Whole Thing Broke
Aschenbrenner was by no means shopping for Bitcoin (BTC). He was shopping for megawatts. Miners already owned grid capability, and AI knowledge facilities wanted it.
The actual hazard sat elsewhere. In March, the fund held $8.5 billion of put choices towards Nvidia, Oracle, Broadcom and different AI names. Those have been its hedges.
By June 30, they’d nearly fully gone. In their place stood $12.5 billion of outright lengthy bets. Sandisk and Micron alone accounted for 55.6% of the entire guide.
So the fund stopped hedging and doubled down as an alternative. When chip shares slid in July, nothing cushioned the autumn. Miners have been collateral injury in a memory-chip commerce.
Griffin Cleared It in Three Weeks
Citadel moved rapidly. It pushed by means of practically 100 block trades value greater than $4 billion, together with the most important intraday blocks of the 12 months in 10 separate names.
“Our skill to distribute this danger was central to our funding thesis,” Reuters reported, citing Ken Griffin within the letter.
Citadel purchased the portfolio at a low cost, and three Citadel funds gained sharply afterward.
What Changes for Miner Holders
A big vendor with no cause to care about worth is now largely out. That fingers the sector again to its personal numbers, from internet hosting offers like Riot’s Anthropic lease to heavy quarterly mining losses.
The tape helps too. Bitcoin’s 7% each day achieve lifted BTC to about $77,309 and its market worth to roughly $1.55 trillion.
One query stays. Aschenbrenner loaded up on miners as a result of he believed hashrate was actually a declare on energy. Citadel has now bought most of it. Whoever purchased these blocks made the identical wager, quietly, at a lower cost.
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