Riot’s Corsicana Facility (Riot Platforms)

Riot posts record earnings, but stock sinks with rest of crypto

Riot Platforms said all the right things to please investors, but its price is being dragged down as bitcoin tumbles.

2/25/25 10:58AM

Bitcoin mining and digital infrastructure company Riot Platforms reported surprisingly solid fourth-quarter and full-year financial earnings on February 24, blowing past expectations, thanks primarily to bitcoin mining revenue.

Despite the positive news, the stock fell overnight and continued its slide in early trading, dropping 9% as of 10:55 a.m. ET. The overall crypto market has been tumbling, with bitcoin down to $87,000 as of writing, the lowest point since November.

The company reported record revenue of $376.7 million for the year, a 34% increase from the $280.7 million for fiscal year 2023. The company said the main driver for the increase was the $132 million in bitcoin mining revenue. Net income increased to $109.4 million in 2024, compared to a net loss of $49.4 million in 2023. Meanwhile, earnings per share were at $0.43 for the fourth quarter, exceeding Zacks’ consensus estimate of a $0.27 loss. This is also a significant change compared to a $0.54 earnings per share loss in the third quarter.

“These results are particularly noteworthy in the context of the bitcoin network’s ‘halving’ in April of 2024, and an increase in global hash rate of 67% over the course of the year,” Riot CEO Jason Les said in the earnings release.

In fiscal year 2024, the company saw an eye-popping 141% increase in bitcoin holdings compared to the end of 2023, with 17,722 bitcoin as of December 31, 2024. At the end of January 2025, its holdings stood at 18,221. This places Riot as the third-largest public company holding bitcoin, behind Strategy and MARA Holdings.

“One of the tenets of Riot strategy has been to maintain a strong balance sheet, underpinned by our growing bitcoin balance since 2018. This has allowed Riot to act opportunistically and grow our portfolio of assets,” Les said on the earnings call.

However, the number of bitcoin produced in 2024 decreased to 4,828, down 27% from the 6,626 produced in 2023. This was due to the skyrocketing mining cost: $32,216 per bitcoin, way up from $3,831 in 2023. The hike was “primarily driven by higher network difficulty and higher average energy costs.”

“Crypto mining really boils down to two costs in the simplest terms: the cost of electricity and the cost of hardware,” Kevin Rusher, founder of RWA lending platform RAAC, said. He added that sourcing cheap electricity, such as with Riot’s Texas-based Corsicana Facility, will allow Riot to outpace smaller competitors.

Looking ahead: AI expansion

Riot said it’s pursuing opportunities in the AI and high-power computing (HPC) sector at its Corsicana Facility in 2025.

“The market has already taken notice of the value of AI/HPC contracts and has rewarded those companies, which have made this pivot with elevated valuation multiples,” Les said, adding that the diversification sets them apart from “the remaining bitcoin mining pure-play players.”

“While revenues from bitcoin mining can exhibit volatility in the near term, AI/HPC contracts offer long-term, predictable cash flows with credible counterparties,” Les said.

Rachel Lin, cofounder and CEO of decentralized derivatives trading platform SynFutures, said Riot’s exploration of AI and high-performance computing suggests a forward-looking approach that could potentially set a new benchmark for the industry.

“Their performance points to a broader trend in which the industry is increasingly favoring well-resourced players, leaving smaller operators at a disadvantage,” Lin said.

Other experts echoed the sentiment, noting that for the broader industry, Riot’s results could indicate what’s to come for other large mining firms.

“If their margins are holding up well despite bitcoin price fluctuations, it suggests that well-capitalized miners will continue to consolidate power while smaller operations struggle with the upcoming halving,” Ermin Sharich, cofounder of stablecoin platform Aegis, said.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy is a financial journalist who’s written for Dow Jones, The Financial Times Group, and Business Insider.

Sage D. Young6/16/26

Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/16/26

Bitcoin is “caught between flow deterioration and macro relief”

Sage D. Young6/15/26

Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Ethereum has increased more than 9% to trade above $1,800, amid BitMine Immersion Technologies acquiring $139.2 million worth of ethereum.
XRP and solana have rebounded from multiyear lows, each rising roughly 10%.
HYPE has bounced up 12%.
Dog-based memecoins dogecoin and shiba inu have chased gains of more than 4%.

“Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets,” Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were “very oversold” following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. “Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.”

“Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop that’s stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/15/26

Bitcoin hits highest level in 2 weeks following news of Iran deal

Bitcoin crossed $66,500 Monday morning as the broad crypto market welcomed the return of a risk-on mood.