Miners Pivot to AI; BitMine Buys 101,000 ETH; Stablecoins Rise

IREN is repositioning from Bitcoin mining toward building data centers for artificial intelligence workloads. Analysts highlight the company’s access to large-scale energy infrastructure and estimate an AI cloud segment could reach about $3.7 billion. IREN has expanded its data center footprint and raised financing to support the new focus.

BitMine added 101,000 ETH in its latest purchase, bringing total corporate Ether holdings to roughly $17.6 billion. Data show BitMine’s average acquisition price for ETH is about $3,621.34, while a recent market price was near $2,248.55, leaving more than $6.5 billion in unrealized losses on the position. The purchase continues a long-running accumulation strategy that has made BitMine the largest corporate holder of Ether.

Stablecoin metrics diverged from on-chain activity. Total stablecoin supply rose above $305 billion while transfer volume fell about 19% to roughly $8.3 trillion over the past month. The number of holders and active addresses increased slightly. Net flows for the 30-day window show Tether’s USDT with the largest inflows at about $3.6 billion, followed by USDC; USDe and PayPal USD recorded outflows.

OKX added BlackRock’s tokenized U.S. Treasuries fund, BUIDL, to its platform and enabled institutional clients to post the asset as trading collateral under a framework developed with Standard Chartered. Under the arrangement, the Treasury-backed fund can remain in regulated custody with the bank while a mirrored representation is used for trading and margin, and in some cases the collateral stays off-exchange under the bank’s custody while a tokenized mirror supports execution.

Market participants pursued different approaches: miners and infrastructure firms expanding compute capacity for AI, corporate treasuries concentrating large holdings in a single cryptocurrency, and exchanges enabling tokenized TradFi assets to be used as collateral.