However, that underperformance masks a reversal in the past two months, when miners surged more than 46% against Bitcoin’s 11% rise, flipping the performance spread into positive territory on shorter time frames.
The divergence shows the structural risks in listed mining equities and the concentrated bursts of upside that appear when conditions align. Understanding where miners trail and where they overshoot is important for assessing their role as a proxy for Bitcoin exposure.
During this stretch, BTC’s flat price action illustrates how miners can outperform in bursts even when the underlying asset stalls. The 30-day data confirm the effect: miners rose 4.8% while BTC fell 1.6%, again creating a positive spread of more than six percentage points.
These bursts are not uniform in size. WULF and IREN dominate recent gains, while MARA and CLSK lag, down 17.9% and 22.4% over the past 30 days. That imbalance shows the rally is as much about stock-level catalysts and positioning as it is about Bitcoin beta.
Drawdowns reinforce the structural gap between miners and Bitcoin. BTC’s maximum drawdown in 2025 is 28%. By contrast, most miners have been hit with drawdowns of 43–72%. Even after their rebound, the scars from the first half remain visible in price trajectories. Investors sizing miners as a levered proxy for BTC need to account for these equity-specific risks, particularly during consolidation phases in the underlying asset.
The equal-weighted miner basket captures the broader picture well: lagging Bitcoin by 7.7 percentage points year-to-date, but outpacing it by 35.6 points over the last 60 days. The path dependency here is central.
In January through June, miners endured steep declines as hashprice compressed, energy costs climbed, and balance sheets absorbed stress. The rally flipped the spread decisively from late June onward, but too late to erase the earlier gap.
This means that miners are not simply leveraged Bitcoin. They function as high-beta instruments only in select windows, while stock-specific catalysts dictate returns for much of the year. Risk budgeting based on simple beta assumptions fails in this environment.
Timing and stock selection become essential: owning the wrong miner at the wrong time meant drawdowns more than twice as deep as Bitcoin’s, while holding IREN or WULF meant triple-digit gains.
Mining equities can provide upside convexity during strong market phases and bring equity-market volatility, operational leverage, and financing risk. The data show the leverage cuts both ways: the equal-weighted index underperformed BTC year-to-date, even as a handful of names delivered exceptional upside.
