Vanguard Group, a financial manager controlling assets worth over $7.2 trillion, is buying more stocks from leading bitcoin mining companies per recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Per public data, Vanguard has been increasing its exposure to stocks from some of the United States’ top Bitcoin miners, specifically Marathon Digital and Riot Blockchain.
Vanguard increases exposure to bitcoin mining stocks
Records show that Vanguard holds 17.5 million shares of Marathon Digital worth $280.5 million. At the same time, it owns 17.9 million of Riot Blockchain shares worth $281 million based on recent share prices. The shares of these miners are listed on leading bourses in the United States.
Based on this, Vanguard currently owns over $500 million worth of Bitcoin mining stock. Most importantly, their investment represents a notable shift in strategy following earlier skepticism on crypto’s investment potential.
For investors, Vanguard’s increasing exposure to Bitcoin miners is bullish. It possibly reflects the growing interest of institutional investors in Bitcoin, the only crypto project whose native currency, BTC, is endorsed by the SEC as a commodity. This is despite the SEC cracking the whip on several crypto companies it alleges are non-compliant.
Besides Vanguard, other major asset managers, including BlackRock and Fidelity, have also shown interest in bitcoin. The recent Bitcoin spot ETF filing by BlackRock drove BTC to over $31,000 in late June 2023.
Bitcoin mining involves using powerful computers to verify transactions on the blockchain, with miners receiving newly minted BTC as rewards. The deflationary nature of BTC has seen its prices rise by several folds in the last few years.
At one point, BTC soared to over $69,000 in late 2021. Meanwhile, despite lower prices, the Bitcoin network’s hash rate is at near all-time highs. As of July 8, hash rate, the network’s computational power, rose to 440 EH/s.
Prominent bitcoin miners expanding
Marathon Digital and Riot Blockchain plan to expand their mining operations. Both miners also aim to add more new rigs in the coming months. This will not only increase their capacity to mine more coins, but the network’s hash rate will rise, further making the network secure.
In 2024, the Bitcoin network will halve block rewards to 3.125 BTC, in a supply shock that will likely impact miner revenue. Reading from past halving events, the community expects bitcoin prices to rally. However, whether bulls will push prices to 2021 highs remain to be seen.
