Shares of the top publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies plunged on Thursday a day after U.S. President Donald Trump rattled markets by imposing global tariffs.
American miners, including Hive Digital, CleanSpark, Riot Platforms, and BitDeer were all trading between 6-8% lower on Thursday morning New York time.
Other U.S. Bitcoin miners such as Core Scientific and MARA dropped by more than 11% and 8%, respectively.
The dip in prices comes after crypto-friendly Trump said he would impose a 10% baseline tariff on all imports to the U.S. and higher duties on some of the country’s biggest trading partners, including a 34% fee on China, which manufactures most mining equipment. The U.S. already levies a 20% tariff on many Chinese goods.
And more pain could come, Wolfie Zhao, head of research at mining trade publication TheMinerMag, told Decrypt. “Operationally, the tariffs certainly will have an impact on mining companies that heavily rely on Chinese ASIC manufacturers for future growth,” he said.
“The increase in capital expense means a longer return on investment in an environment when the mining economics are already shrinking.”
The industry, which is largely U.S.-based, has struggled in recent weeks as the price of Bitcoin dipped, It had already had to reckon with a dramatic increase in mining difficulty and smaller rewards stemming from last year’s halving, which cut the payoff for verifying transactions on the blockchain from 6.25 to 3.125 bitcoin.
Bitcoin miners—typically industrial operations consisting of warehouses full of computers that work to secure the network—are rewarded in newly minted coins for processing blocks on the decentralized payment network.
But when the price of the biggest cryptocurrency drops, businesses can struggle to cover their costs.
Trump promised to help the digital asset industry on the campaign trail. He said that he wanted all future Bitcoin to be 100% American-made—something that would probably be impossible.
Bitcoin’s price was recently at $81,941, according to data provider CoinGecko, after dropping more than 5% over a 24-hour period.
Almost every major digital coin and token was also in the red Thursday afternoon Eastern Time.
Edited by James Rubin
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