In 2025, miners mined approximately 162 thousand bitcoins. At the current rate of about $88 thousand per bitcoin, this amounts to $14.3 billion. The leader in the extraction of the first cryptocurrency remains the United States, while Russia, according to expert estimates, firmly holds second place.
Despite the difficulties faced by the industry in the past year, the activity of miners has not decreased, and the challenges they faced have transformed the sector. The rising cost of electricity, increasing mining complexity, regulatory restrictions, and the fall in the bitcoin rate at the end of 2025—all this reduces the profitability of mining, displaces some industry participants, and forces others to adapt and restructure their business models.
"RBC-Crypto" has gathered the most notable changes in the world of mining that occurred in the past year. The experts interviewed spoke about the trends and problems of the industry.
Changes in the Network
The total computing power of equipment connected to the Bitcoin network (hashrate) in 2025 for the first time exceeded the mark of 1 Zh/s (zetahash per second) and firmly established itself above it. At the end of October, the hashrate momentarily set a maximum of 1.31 Zh/s. The average indicator for the last two weeks is 1.07 Zh/s.
Following the hashrate, the mining complexity also increased. Since the beginning of the year, it has increased by 35%, from 109.78 T to 148.26 T (trillion). The increase in complexity reduces the efficiency of equipment—outdated models have less and less chance of mining a block and receiving new bitcoins. Market participants who do not update their "fleet" become less competitive.
Activity in the Bitcoin network has decreased, and therefore miners' income from transaction fees has fallen to annual lows. In early January, the daily figure was around $600 thousand, at peaks in the first half of the year it rose to $900 thousand. By December 28, the sum of fees per day dropped to $210 thousand, according to the analytical panel of The Block.
Miners' income consists of two parts: a reward for adding a new block and network fees for transactions. The block reward is a value that halves every four years as a result of planned emission reductions (halvings). In the future, mining profitability will increasingly depend on the size of fees, and the industry believes that their decline entails risks for business sustainability.
In early December, a key indicator of miners' profitability collapsed to $35 per petahash per second (PH/s), which is 45% lower than the annual peak of $64 PH/s reached in July. Under such conditions, even the most efficient companies with cheap energy are operating practically at zero.
Global Trends
After the 2024 halving, the mining economy in 2025 became noticeably tougher: competition intensified, and margins increasingly began to depend on the cost of energy, access to capital, and the scale of infrastructure, says Anton Gontarev, Commercial Director of Intilion. According to him, the market is moving towards an institutional model.
The growth in mining complexity reflects the growing interest in the industry and increased demand from large players and investors. Against this background, cryptocurrency mining is increasingly being considered as part of a broader computing ecosystem, says Gontarev.
"Large projects are initially designed as universal data centers capable of operating in different modes—from mining digital assets to high-performance computing and artificial intelligence tasks. Such a model reflects investors' requirements for revenue diversification and risk reduction," the expert said.
At the same time, as AI infrastructure becomes an increasingly attractive business direction for miners, the risk is growing that companies will gradually divert resources from Bitcoin mining to it. But the trend is developing, and the fact that it is receiving a positive response in the market is evidenced by the growth in shares of miners who have decided to diversify their activities in favor of artificial intelligence. For example, in December, shares of the American company Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT) rose by 25% after it announced a deal with Anthropic and Fluidstack in the field of AI.
The emergence in the US in the spring of 2025 of the miner American Bitcoin in conjunction with the same Hut 8, as well as with investments from the Trump family, showed that mining is perceived as a strategic infrastructure asset, to which large investors and public figures are publicly joining, noted Gontarev. According to him, the increase in the number of such public and widely announced projects has become a separate marker of market maturity.
The Year of Legal Mining in Russia
Russia accounts for about 16% of the global hashrate—the market share of mining. Based on the fact that a total of 162 thousand bitcoins were mined during the year, about 26 thousand coins ($2.2 billion) of them may be of Russian origin.
The industry entered the legal field just over a year ago, but its impact on the country's foreign exchange market was already recognized in mid-December by the Bank of Russia. According to the head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, mining can act as an additional factor contributing to the strengthening of the ruble. A little earlier, Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Maxim Oreshkin stated that underestimation of financial flows related to mining and cryptocurrency could be the reason for incorrect forecasts of the ruble exchange rate. He called this sector a new hidden export item.
The domestic industrial mining market will be able to provide liquidity to participants in the digital currency market, believes the owner and CEO of GIS Mining, Vasily Gira. Nevertheless, he noted that so far miners need to more actively enter the Russian legal field.
Mining was permitted in Russia on November 1, 2024. In some territories of the country, cryptocurrency mining is limited until the spring of 2031 due to electricity shortages. These are the republics of the North Caucasus, LPR, DPR, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, Buryatia, Transbaikalia, and the south of the Irkutsk region.
At the same time, a mechanism for legalizing mining equipment imported in previous years under gray schemes has not been created. Industry participants call this one of the main obstacles for many miners to come out of the shadows, believing that less than 30% of the equipment is officially registered with the Federal Tax Service.
Illegal miners—those who have not registered with the tax service—continue to mine cryptocurrency bypassing established rules. A large number of violators are found in the North Caucasus. Since the beginning of the year, more than 100 illegal mining farms have been found there.
The total number of mining farms in Russia in 2025 increased by 44% and amounted to 196.9 thousand, according to the MTS EnergyTool energy consumption control system. This system analyzes information from "smart" meters and detects anomalies, helping to find taps and other electricity leaks.
MTS calculated that mining farms were most often found in the Irkutsk and Novosibirsk regions, as well as in the Republic of Bashkortostan. The smallest number was found in the Volgograd, Ivanovo, and Sverdlovsk regions, the Chuvash Republic, Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Altai Krai, and the regions of the Black Earth Region.
As a Unified System
The Association of Industrial Mining (AIM) names the sharp drop in the price of Bitcoin from $126 thousand in October to the current $88 thousand, equal to the cost of production ($85–90 thousand per bitcoin), as one of the current problems of Russian miners. But 2026 promises growth for the Russian crypto market, says the director of AIM, Sergey Bezdelov. According to the expert's forecasts, the Bitcoin exchange rate will recover against the backdrop of further interest from large investors and an influx of liquidity, and the strengthening of integration with AI and the financial market will allow miners to implement various initiatives, including entering the bond market, IPO, and loans secured by cryptocurrency.
Last week, Sber conducted the first pilot deal in Russia for lending secured by cryptocurrency with the mining company Intilion. The bank noted that such a product will be relevant not only for miners but also for any companies that have crypto assets in their ownership.
The industry is moving towards the formation of a comprehensive regulatory model in which tax requirements, the legal status of equipment, the circulation of digital assets, and control practices are for the first time beginning to work as a unified system, Gontarev said. Regional restrictions, including a complete ban in a number of Russian subjects, have essentially set new conditions for infrastructure placement, the expert believes.
The market has begun to reorient itself towards its own gas generation. Placing computing infrastructure directly on gas fields is becoming a way to reduce dependence on network restrictions, says Gontarev. The AIM confirmed that the geography of gas generation application using GPU in regions with accessible natural gas has expanded. And this has become a new milestone in the development of the industry, says Bezdelov.
Intilion also noted that in 2025, the trend of combining mining with computing infrastructure for AI intensified in the market. Mining sites are increasingly being designed as universal data centers with the ability to flexibly redistribute the load. For example, according to Gontarev, a project is being implemented in the Samara region where mining is initially laid down as one of the modes of using capacity and can be supplemented with AI loads as demand forms.
In 2025, a trend was identified in which the number of equipment supply contracts decreased, but the amount of each contract increased, Bezdelov said. In his opinion, this trend has taken shape thanks to the interest of large players such as large public companies and state corporations, turning mining into an effective tool for monetizing excess electricity.
The agenda now includes the issue of regulating the specifics of the domestic IT infrastructure of mining pools and mechanisms for buying and selling cryptocurrency, admitting various categories of market participants into this sphere, according to GIS Mining. A big step in this direction was taken by the Bank of Russia at the end of the year: the regulator presented a concept for regulating the crypto market, according to which both qualified and non-qualified market participants will be able to buy and sell crypto assets.
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