CleanSpark’s counter-cyclical expansion and Coinbase’s negative premium look like signs of a split inside the Bitcoin market.

CleanSpark posted striking numbers for fiscal 2025, with revenue reaching $766.3 million, double the year-earlier level. Net income came in at $364.5 million, reversing a $145.8 million loss in the previous year.

The miner, which holds 13,011 bitcoins valued at roughly $1.14 billion, is using an asymmetric playbook to navigate Bitcoin’s price volatility.

Its core strategy is to turn Bitcoin into liquid capital. It secured a $17.4 million credit line from Coinbase and is funding expansion with $115 million in zero-interest convertible notes. The approach avoids equity dilution while using derivatives to improve returns on its holdings.

By the end of September, the company’s computing power had reached 45.6 EH/s, or 4.3% of the global total. Its direct cost to mine one bitcoin was held at $82,700, well below this year’s price range of roughly $84,000 to $124,500.

CEO Matt Schultz is clearly thinking beyond crypto mining. The company has acquired a mining farm in Tennessee and is building out AI data center capacity in Texas, with plans to convert 620 MW of energy assets into a dual computing power platform for “Bitcoin plus AI.”

CFO Vikiarrelli put it plainly: “We’re not playing the ideology game. Bitcoin is a working capital asset.” That view stands in sharp contrast to MicroStrategy’s strategy of holding Bitcoin without selling.

Coinbase’s market data, however, points to a different picture. Bitcoin’s premium index has stayed negative for 21 consecutive days, the longest stretch of this cycle, closely matching Bitcoin’s drop from $120,000 to $84,500.

The hourly premium reading of minus 0.06 serves as evidence of sustained selling by U.S. institutions, with 70,000 open contracts sliding alongside the price.

Bearish sentiment is building. What makes the situation more interesting is how closely the two companies are connected.

CleanSpark keeps all 13,000 of its bitcoins in custody with Coinbase, and any expansion of its credit line also depends on Coinbase’s support. On one side, a miner is using operating assets to drive a sharp profit rebound; on the other, an exchange is being squeezed by institutional selling. The contrast captures the current fracture inside the Bitcoin ecosystem.

CleanSpark’s shift may be a signal that the stalemate can be broken. By combining crypto mining computing power with AI data centers, it is turning energy costs, which account for 43.9% of revenue, into a competitive advantage.

But Coinbase’s negative premium data is also a reminder that when institutional confidence has yet to recover, the efforts of any single player are unlikely to reverse the market’s inertia.

Bitcoin’s evolution has never been a single-track story. Miners are shifting from pure producers of computing power into broader computing power service providers, while exchanges remain caught in the pull of institutional selling.

The question now is whether this divergence marks the opening of a major industry reshuffle, or is merely another episode in the cycle.

The clue may lie at a point of balance: the return of institutional capital on one side, and the monetization of computing power assets on the other.