The Bitcoin Beacon
One of the two biggest makers of mining machines is now selling bitcoin to defend a collapsing share price.
GLOBAL — Canaan, one of the two largest manufacturers of bitcoin mining rigs, reported a second-quarter net loss of $97.6 million as revenue collapsed 68% to $13.6 million — below even the floor of its own guidance. The results, released September 8, sent its U.S.-listed shares down about 10% to roughly 32 cents.
To fund a share buyback, the company sold 3,952 ether and 54 bitcoin in late August for about $13.9 million, directing part of the proceeds toward repurchasing its own stock. By September 8 it had bought back roughly 16.4 million American depositary shares for about $7.4 million.
Canaan is not a treasury company that happens to hold bitcoin; it builds the machines that secure the network. That makes the sale telling. When a firm whose entire business is manufacturing hashpower has to liquidate its own coins to steady its equity, the strain has reached the base of the industry, not just its speculative edges.
The pressure is structural. Mining-machine sales have weakened as operators delay upgrades; the post-halving block subsidy still squeezes margins; and the most profitable megawatts increasingly get pointed at AI compute rather than hashing. Canaan mined 243 bitcoin itself during the quarter, a reminder that it competes with its own customers for thin returns.
A company that makes the machines securing bitcoin is selling bitcoin to survive the quarter.
Management guided to just $11 million to $15 million of revenue in the third quarter. That is a fraction of the $42 million the company booked a year earlier, and it leaves little room for error in a business with heavy fixed costs and a share price already in penny-stock territory.
None of this is a verdict on the network. Difficulty and hashrate have held near record levels, which means the security bitcoin buys is intact even as the firms selling the picks and shovels bleed. But it is a reminder that the industrial layer beneath bitcoin runs on ordinary corporate math — revenue, margins, share counts — and that a miner-maker forced to sell coins is a stress signal worth watching.
Why it matters: bitcoin’s security is produced by companies with balance sheets, and when the biggest of them sell their own coins to stay afloat, the hardware layer is under real strain.
Loss, revenue, asset sales, buyback and guidance figures per Canaan’s Sept 8, 2026 results release and same-day reporting. Share-price move per MarketWatch. Informational only — not financial advice.
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