Bitcoin miners hold on to a lot of the BTC they mine; they are called the “original whales” for a reason. Here’s what the data says regarding which of the publicly listed mining companies hold the most coins.

Why Do Bitcoin Mining Companies Keep BTC Treasuries?

Before looking at the numbers, one question arises first. Why do these mining companies hold on to most of the BTC that they mine, instead of selling it?

A big reason behind publicly listed miners maintaining a Bitcoin treasury is that they want their stocks to act as BTC investment vehicles.

Many traditional investors may not have gotten any BTC exposure yet due to a number of factors. For one, they might not be versed with the workings of the crypto world so they may not be comfortable dealing with exchanges and wallets.

However, such investors would be familiar with the stock market so they can look into stocks of Bitcoin mining companies, who keep large BTC treasuries to keep their stocks more correlated with the price of the crypto, and get exposure to the coin that way.

In fact, BTC mining stocks outperformed by two-to-one the coin’s ROI during the year 2021. So these stocks would have been a better investment than the crypto itself for the period.

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Another reason these companies keep treasuries is that mining is capital intensive, and since these firms keep expanding their capacity, they need to maintain a liquid balance sheet.

Since they are Bitcoin bulls, it makes sense for them to keep their reserves in the form of BTC itself, rather than converting to fiat.

Which Public BTC Miners Hold The Most Amount Of Coins?

Now, coming back to the original topic, here is some data from the latest Arcane Research report about the reserves of the largest public Bitcoin mining companies:

Marathon looks to have the largest BTC treasury | Source: Arcane Research's The Weekly Update - Week 10, 2022

As you can see above, Marathon is number one on the list with its Bitcoin treasury amounting to just under 9k BTC.

Core Scientific follows up in second with about 7.3k BTC. Hut 8 with 6.1k BTC and Riot with 5.7k BTC are 3rd and 4th place, respectively.

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Interestingly, Marathon’s BTC reserve is the third largest of any public company, behind only MicroStrategy and Tesla.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price floats around $40.3k, down 4% in the past week. The below chart shows the trend in the price of the coin over the last five days.