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Bitcoin’s recent price decline may be less about macro sentiment and more about structural dynamics tied to institutional products, according to BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes. In a post on X, Hayes suggested that the latest BTC selloff was likely driven by dealer hedging activit...

Bitcoin price started a recovery again yesterday after around a 40% dip from its January 2026 high. BTC price jumped close to 20% from the low near $59,900 and pushed back toward the low $70,000s within hours. Such a fast rebound looked unusual for a market that had fallen steadi...

Summary IREN controls over 4.5 GW of secured power, yet needs only ~460 MW to support $3.4 billion AI ARR by CY26. Approximately $2.3 billion of AI ARR is already contracted, including $1.9 billion from Microsoft and $0.4 billion from Prince George. Q2 revenue fell to $184.7 million, and net income swung to a $155 million loss, driven primarily by depreciation and non-cash charges. GPU capex is roughly 95% funded at sub-6% rates, leaving execution timing, not financing or demand, as the core variable. I do think that the extent to which the market sold off cannot be disassociated from what was going on from a broader macro perspective. Bitcoin prices declined significantly around the earnings announcement, and that really compressed sentiment across the mining industry. At the same time, hyperscaler capex guidance caused people to suddenly rethink returns within the broader AI infrastructure landscape. IREN Ltd. ( IREN ) sits at the intersection of these stories. The company still has mining exposure, and they are building AI infrastructure at scale. Where both factors are negative, a high-beta stock that is priced for execution will react violently. The narrative is not broken, but rather the monetization assumption is now clearly front-loaded on capital expenditures and back-loaded on revenues. This is a huge difference when the valuation is already tight and the macro environment is increasingly volatile. The market is reacting to the disappointment of the report, while the underlying numbers suggest a different story. Mining Is the Past - Capacity Is the Thesis I think that the business of IREN is not the business of a Bitcoin miner anymore, despite the fact that the business of Bitcoin mining is still the lion's share of the revenues. The business of Bitcoin mining is best understood as a legacy business that the company has deliberately capped. The business of Bitcoin mining is intentionally not growing, which is a perfectly reasonable business decision. The consequence of this decision is that the business of Bitcoin mining can no longer grow enough to offset the volatility of the rest of the business. Another important nuance is the difference between contracted ARR and recognized revenue. As of February 2026, IREN reported approximately $2.3 billion of ARR under contract. This breaks down into around $1.9 billion related to the Microsoft contract and the remaining ~$0.4 billion related to the Prince George deployment in British Columbia. The important point here is that much of this revenue under contract has yet to start generating revenue. This is why AI Cloud Services revenue in Q2 was only $17.3 million , up from $7.3 million in Q1. It is also why this revenue is still immaterial to the consolidated income statement. What the earnings miss revealed is not a problem with demand but the cost of capitalizing this future revenue before it is earned. IREN Limited 2026 Q2 On the surface of things, Q2 was a tough quarter. Revenue declined sequentially to $184.7 million. Net income turned into a loss of $155 million. EBITDA turned negative by a similar amount. But what’s important here is what drove these results. Mining revenue declined due to a decrease in Bitcoin prices and difficulty rates remaining high. This was expected due to the limited supply of hashrate. AI revenue sequentially improved but remains small compared to the cost base now embedded in the business. Depreciation expense also jumped to over $99 million as IREN capitalized data center infrastructure and GPUs. Non-cash items such as impairments related to the ASIC-to-GPU transition in British Columbia also skewed GAAP profitability. Adjusted EBITDA remains positive at $75 million. This doesn’t make the quarter good, but it does underscore that asset economics haven’t fallen off a cliff. The real business is AI infrastructure, and the relevant assets are not GPUs or buildings. They're power, grid access, and delivery speed. In that regard, IREN is further along than the market appears to appreciate. The secured power, grid access, and delivery speed that the company now has in place is in excess of 4.5 GW , including the addition of the 1.6 GW Oklahoma campus. Of that total, only about 460 MW is required to achieve the company's stated $3.4 billion AI Cloud ARR target for CY26. IREN Limited 2026 Q2 That ratio is the key to the whole story. About 10% of the company's secured power is required to achieve the company's stated revenue target. The other 90% is not excess in the economic sense. It's an option that the company can use as it goes forward and the contracts that customers sign come due. The Bear Case Is Fundamentally Wrong I suspect the bear thesis collapses because it treats IREN as a commoditized neocloud operator rather than an infrastructure owner with a capacity constraint. I also think software moats are irrelevant when the limiting factor in AI is actually time to power, not GPUs or code. Why would hyperscalers need to cut out third parties in the first place if this were true? Why would Microsoft sign a 5-year contract for $9.7 billion with prepayments for capacity it could not deliver internally on a timely basis? What I think is far more relevant than the income statement is the asymmetric nature of the asset base. IREN has >4.5 GW of secured power under contract and connected to the grid, yet needs only 460 MW to power the entire $3.4 billion ARR opportunity. This tells me the company is power-rich, not demand-poor. I also do not believe the earnings miss indicates a problem with the model, simply because $2.3 billion of the ARR is already contracted, GPU capex is ~95% funded at This Correction Is a Rare Entry Point The stock is no longer pricing in perfection; however, it does continue to price in some level of confidence in execution. I'm being asked to assume that the company's management is able to execute on a small fraction of the company's secured power and generate high-margin AI revenue in a predictable timeframe. This is not necessarily an unreasonable assumption; however, it is no longer one the market makes on faith. What makes the valuation reasonable is the required level of utilization compared to available capacity. However, what makes it precarious is the timeframe in which to prove out the level of utilization in reported results. What I Am Watching From Here Going forward, IREN needs to be viewed through a smaller set of variables. The first is the clear progression towards the $500 million AI ARR run rate goal that IREN expects in early 2026. This is the point at which AI revenue is large enough that it materially changes the income statement and reduces IREN’s reliance on mining cash flows. I am also watching the pace at which IREN converts the remaining secured capacity into contracts. As a company that has over 4.0 GW of power uncontracted beyond the CY26 plan, they don’t need new land or new work on the grid. IREN just needs new customer contracts and GPU availability. This is a very different risk profile. IREN Limited 2026 Q2 However, a delay in commissioning or utilization would be a bad sign. The impact of a delay in revenue growth will be less significant if contracted ARR continues to grow. Bottom Line I view IREN as a transition asset in a space where the fundamentals are well ahead of the company's earnings. The market was selling the company's revenue story while ignoring the company's capacity math. This is no longer a stock to buy based on a momentum trade. It's a stock to buy based on execution.

South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb, which mistakenly distributed more than $40 billion worth of Bitcoin on Friday, said it will reimburse customers who made losses when they sold their holdings in a panic during a brief but sharp selloff on its platform.

Bitcoin’s price volatility only intensified at the end of the business week as the asset dumped to a multi-month low before it staged an impressive five-digit recovery that was stopped at $72,000. Most altcoins are well in the green on a daily scale, but the weekly charts are still painful. Nevertheless, many have bounced off the multi-year lows they posted yesterday. BTC Stopped at $72K There’s no valid way to sugarcoat what happened in the crypto markets in the past week or so. Just last Saturday, the primary digital asset dumped from $84,000 to under $76,000 in what’s usually a highly uneventful day. Although that was a painful crash on its own, it wasn’t the end of BTC’s struggles. The asset dipped once again to under $74,000 at the beginning of the business week, but the actual calamity took place on Thursday and culminated on Friday morning. At the time, BTC plummeted by approximately $17,000 in just over 24 hours from $77,000 to $60,000, which became its lowest price tag since before the US elections in late 2024. After liquidating thousands of traders for billions of dollars, the move south was finally exhausted, and bitcoin actually went on the offensive on Friday evening. The peak came at almost $72,000, which was tapped on a couple of occasions, but BTC couldn’t break through it. Just the opposite, it was stopped and driven south to $68,000, where it currently sits. Its market capitalization is down to $1.360 trillion on CG, while its dominance over the alts has slipped to 56.6%. BTCUSD Feb 7. Source: TradingView Alts Try to Rebound Ethereum was among the poorest performers during the overall crash, dumping from more than $3,000 to under $2,700 in just over a week. It has bounced since then to $2,010 as of press time. SOL, BCH, XMR are also well in the green, followed by XRP, TRX, DOGE, and ADA. In contrast, the recent high-flyer HYPE has dropped by almost 5% daily and now sits below $33. PUMP and WLFI are also in the red from the larger caps. The total crypto market cap has recovered over $100 billion since its multi-year bottom on Friday morning and is up to $2.4 trillion on CG. Cryptocurrency Market Overview Feb 7. Source: QuantifyCrypto The post Ethereum Reclaims $2K Level, Bitcoin Recovery Halted at $72K: Weekend Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato .

Cathie Wood said markets sold off due to fading AI hype, a crypto market reset, and tighter Federal Reserve policy, adding that the downturn was a reset that is highlighting stronger crypto assets.

Arthur Hayes, a controversial figure in the cryptocurrency world, has offered his assessment of the decline in Bitcoin and altcoins. Continue Reading: BitMEX Founder Arthur Hayes Explains the “Real” Reason Behind Bitcoin’s Decline

Morgan Creek founder Mark Yusko has shut down Bitcoin back door claims.

South Korean regulators investigate Bithumb's massive Bitcoin error during a promotional event, impacting the market. Read original article on nftenex.com