Nonce Insights: How to Read Public Bitcoin Miner Production Rankings

If you follow public Bitcoin miners, BTC production is often the first metric you see—and one of the easiest to misread. How many BTC a company mined in a quarter looks like a simple number, but behind it sit operating hashrate, miner deployment progress, equipment utilization, network difficulty changes, power curtailment, and more. So "first in production" does not mean "first in profitability," and a drop in production does not necessarily mean a miner's business is deteriorating.

Nonce Insights puts public Bitcoin miners' BTC production, quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year changes, BTC treasury, operating hashrate, power cost, cash cost per coin, energy cost, installed power capacity, and fleet efficiency into one data system. The data center currently tracks 17 public Bitcoin miners and compiles quarterly data from SEC filings, company announcements, and investor materials. Taking Q2 2026 as an example, 14 miners were included in BTC production statistics, with combined quarterly production of about 12,861.5 BTC.

So the meaningful question is not "which miner dug the most BTC," but: why could it dig that much? Is production rising or falling? Did growth come from hashrate expansion or better operating efficiency? How much cost did the company pay to get those BTC? Below, using Nonce Insights' public miner production rankings as an example, we explain how to read this table.

What Does the BTC Production Ranking Actually Measure?

BTC production means the number of BTC a miner obtained through Bitcoin mining in a given period. In quarterly earnings analysis, you usually look at BTC actually obtained within a quarter—not how much BTC the miner still holds at quarter-end. It most directly reflects how much of the block subsidy and transaction-fee share a miner earned from the Bitcoin network in that period.

This metric is first related to the hashrate a miner puts into operation. All else roughly equal, the higher a company's actual operating hashrate, the higher its share of network hashrate usually is, and the more BTC it can theoretically earn. But Bitcoin mining is a dynamic competition: if a company's hashrate grows 10% while Bitcoin network hashrate grows 20% over the same period, its actual BTC production may still fall even after deploying more miners.

MARA is a fairly typical example. In Q2 2026, MARA produced 2,422 BTC, versus about 2,358 BTC in the same period of 2025—up about 2.7% year over year. That does not mean production depends only on its own expansion, because while company hashrate grows it also faces changes in overall Bitcoin network hashrate and mining difficulty. Final production is the joint result of a company's own hashrate and network competition intensity.

(Figure: schematic of how BTC production is formed, centered on two core variables—miner operating hashrate and Bitcoin network hashrate—showing how miner deployment, uptime, network difficulty, and block rewards jointly affect quarterly BTC production; dark-gray background, minimal hand-drawn line art)

Full Comparison of Public Miner BTC Production in Q2 2026

Per Nonce Insights public Bitcoin miner data as of Q2 2026, 14 public miners had comparable BTC production data and together produced about 12,861.5 BTC. By absolute production, Bitdeer, MARA, CleanSpark, and Riot form the first tier, each exceeding 1,500 BTC in the quarter; HIVE and American Bitcoin exceed or approach 1,000 BTC; the remaining miners' quarterly production mainly ranges from tens to hundreds of BTC.

Data: Nonce Insights

Bitdeer and MARA both exceeded 2,400 BTC in the quarter; together they produced 5,116 BTC—nearly 40% of the 14-company sample. Add CleanSpark and Riot and the top four reach 8,628 BTC, about two-thirds of sample production. Public miners' Bitcoin production capacity already shows a fairly clear concentration at the top.

But from an investment or mining-ops analysis view, what this table really deserves attention for is not the ranking itself, but the differences behind the ranking.

Bitdeer ranked first at 2,694 BTC, with 80.9 EH/s of operating hashrate. Its Q2 production rose 32.4% quarter over quarter and 376.8% year over year—very strong growth among leading miners this quarter. MARA ranked second at 2,422 BTC; its 57.4 EH/s operating hashrate is also industry-leading, but production rose only 2.7% year over year, showing absolute production remains large while growth differs clearly from Bitdeer.

CleanSpark and Riot produced 1,925 BTC and 1,587 BTC respectively. CleanSpark's operating hashrate reached 45 EH/s, with production down 4.3% year over year; Riot's operating hashrate was 37.2 EH/s, with production up 11.3% year over year. Looking only at absolute production, CleanSpark is clearly above Riot, but once year-over-year change is included, you can see the difference in production trends.

In the second tier, HIVE produced 1,004 BTC in Q2, up 147.3% year over year—another miner on the list with year-over-year growth above 100%. American Bitcoin produced 935 BTC with operating hashrate of 28.1 EH/s, already very close to a thousand BTC in a single quarter.

Further down, Cango still produced 656 BTC in the quarter, but down 53.3% year over year; Cipher Mining produced 346 BTC, down 32%; Core Scientific 300 BTC, down 52.7%; TeraWulf 179 BTC, down 63.1%. These numbers do not mean business value fell in the same proportion, because some public miners have been adjusting power-asset uses and shifting more resources toward AI and high-performance computing infrastructure. For those companies, a drop in BTC production sometimes reflects not only mining-ops changes but also a shifting business mix.

BitFuFu is another case worth noting. It produced only 192 BTC in Q2—twelfth by absolute production—but quarter-over-quarter growth reached 52.4%, among the faster growers of companies that disclosed QoQ data. That shows exactly why a ranking must look at both "absolute production" and "growth rate": 192 BTC cannot be compared with Bitdeer's 2,694 BTC, but it can tell us this company's mining-business pace of change in the latest quarter is worth watching further.

(Figure: full horizontal bar chart of Q2 2026 public miner BTC production, ordered high to low as Bitdeer, MARA, CleanSpark, Riot, HIVE, American Bitcoin, Cango, Keel Infrastructure, Cipher Mining, Core Scientific, Canaan, BitFuFu, TeraWulf, Soluna; data source Nonce Insights)

Why Doesn't Higher Hashrate Always Raise BTC Production Proportionally?

The most important point in reading public miner production rankings is not to treat "hashrate" and "BTC production" as a fixed ratio.

Suppose a miner's operating hashrate grows from 20 EH/s to 25 EH/s—up 25%. If network hashrate barely changes over the same period, that expansion can theoretically help it earn a higher share of block rewards. But if network hashrate also grows 25% over the same period, the company's network hashrate share does not meaningfully rise.

More extremely, if the company grows only 10% while the whole network grows 30%, it may own more miners and higher hashrate yet still see BTC earned fall.

You can find cases worth further analysis of this relationship in the Q2 2026 rankings. Cango had 27.58 EH/s of operating hashrate, higher than HIVE's 24 EH/s, but quarterly BTC production was 656 BTC vs 1,004 BTC; BitFuFu had 15.3 EH/s and produced 192 BTC, while Cipher Mining produced 346 BTC at 11.6 EH/s. These Nonce Insights figures cannot be used directly to calculate miner efficiency, because quarterly average hashrate, period-end hashrate, downtime, curtailment strategy, and business models may differ—but they show very clearly that higher period-end operating hashrate does not mean more BTC earned over the whole quarter.

Besides network hashrate and difficulty, actual operating status also matters a lot. Hashrate metrics in filings are not always equal to the effective hashrate contributing compute work across an entire quarter. Farms may face maintenance, heat, downtime, curtailment, new miner deployment, and grid demand response.

So BTC production can be understood simply as:

BTC production ≈ effective hashrate × actual runtime × network competition share × block-reward conditions

"Effective" especially matters here. Even if two companies have identical installed hashrate, if one has higher miner uptime, fewer low-hashrate units, and faster recovery from downtime, the effective compute it contributes to the pool may still be higher.

For real farm operations, that is also why buying more miners alone does not solve every production problem. When managing large ASIC fleets with Nonce, farms need to keep identifying offline, low-hashrate, high-temperature, and other abnormal machines, and use filters, bulk actions, and automation to cut useless downtime. The larger the scale, the more a few percentage points of uptime difference can show up in effective hashrate—and in output.

The Fastest-Growing Miner Is Not Necessarily the Largest Producer

Another important way to read the full ranking is to separate "production rank" from "YoY and QoQ growth."

From Nonce Insights Q2 2026 data, Bitdeer's BTC production rose 376.8% year over year and HIVE 147.3%—clearly above other miners with comparable YoY disclosure; BitFuFu rose 34.3%, Riot 11.3%, MARA 2.7%. On the other hand, TeraWulf, Cango, Core Scientific, Cipher Mining, Soluna, Canaan, and CleanSpark all saw production fall year over year to varying degrees.

Miner	BTC production	YoY change
Bitdeer	2,694 BTC	+376.8%
HIVE	1,004 BTC	+147.3%
BitFuFu	192 BTC	+34.3%
Riot	1,587 BTC	+11.3%
MARA	2,422 BTC	+2.7%
CleanSpark	1,925 BTC	-4.3%
Canaan	244 BTC	-14.1%
Soluna	23.5 BTC	-17.8%
Cipher Mining	346 BTC	-32.0%
Core Scientific	300 BTC	-52.7%
Cango	656 BTC	-53.3%
TeraWulf	179 BTC	-63.1%

Data: Nonce Insights

That is one of the most valuable parts of a miner production ranking. A company can sit near the top of absolute production while growth has slowed; another may still have modest production but be scaling quickly. If you study "industry leaders," absolute production matters more; if you study "growth trends," YoY and QoQ are more useful.

First in Production Does Not Mean First in Profit

This is the easiest misconception in public miner production rankings. A miner can raise BTC production by deploying more ASICs, building more farms, and buying more power—but scale itself does not mean higher profit per BTC. If new sites have higher power prices, weaker efficiency, or carry heavy operating costs to gain more hashrate, a company can raise BTC production while facing higher mining cost per coin.

So after reading the BTC production ranking, a more reasonable next step is to check the cash cost per coin ranking. In Q2 2026, Nonce Insights collected cash cost per coin for 11 miners that disclosed related data. Bitdeer was about $39,866, Soluna about $40,766, Cipher Mining about $43,486, TeraWulf about $44,547, Riot about $49,912, HIVE about $50,797, BitFuFu $59,000, MARA about $60,743, Cango about $73,000, Core Scientific about $79,000, and Keel Infrastructure about $93,000.

Looking back at the production list, the contrast is very clear. MARA produced 2,422 BTC in Q2—second on the production ranking—but cash cost per coin was about $60,743; Riot produced 1,587 BTC, below MARA, but cash cost per coin was about $49,912; Cipher Mining produced only 346 BTC, but cash cost per coin was about $43,486.

That does not mean you can simply conclude "lower-cost companies always run better," because disclosure definitions, asset structure, power strategy, site location, and business mix all differ. But it is enough to show an important fact: BTC production measures mining scale; cost per coin answers something closer to "at what cost were these BTC mined."

Truly analyzing miner operating quality requires putting both kinds of data together.

BTC Production Should Be Read Together with Treasury

Another easy mix-up is BTC production vs BTC treasury. Production means "how much was mined this quarter"; treasury means "how much the company still held at quarter-end." They are not the same. A company may produce large amounts of BTC each quarter but keep selling to cover operating expenses, so ending treasury is not high; another may long retain historically produced BTC—or add Bitcoin assets other ways—so ending treasury far exceeds single-quarter production.

As of end of Q2 2026, Nonce Insights shows MARA's BTC treasury at about 35,577 BTC, American Bitcoin 17,316 BTC, CleanSpark 13,924 BTC, and Riot 11,380 BTC, while those four companies' quarterly BTC production was 2,422 BTC, 935 BTC, 1,925 BTC, and 1,587 BTC respectively.

Bitdeer forms an interesting contrast: it ranked first in Q2 production at 2,694 BTC, but ending BTC treasury was only about 150 BTC. In other words, "mining the most right now" and "holding the most BTC on the balance sheet" are completely different concepts.

So the production ranking answers "who mined more in the current period," while the treasury ranking answers something closer to "who has accumulated more BTC assets." Combining the two also lets you observe different miners' funding strategies, sell strategies, and capital allocation.

(Figure: conceptual distinction between BTC production and BTC treasury, using only two abstract elements—"pickaxe generating BTC" and "vault storing BTC"—to show quarterly production and period-end treasury are different metrics)

How to Read Miner Rankings

If you just want a quick read on a public Bitcoin miner's operations, you can treat Nonce Insights data as a continuous chain of questions:

BTC production tells you "how much was mined"; QoQ and YoY tell you "rising or falling"; operating hashrate helps explain "whether production changes came from scale expansion"; fleet efficiency and power price tell you "whether that hashrate runs with a cost advantage"; energy cost per coin and cash cost per coin further answer "how much it ultimately cost to mine one BTC"; BTC treasury reflects "after mining, how much the company kept."

Q2 2026 data especially shows this logic. Bitdeer is first in production and has the largest operating hashrate; MARA is second in production but has the largest BTC treasury on the list; Cipher Mining's production scale is far below the leaders yet has lower cash cost per coin; HIVE ranks only fifth in absolute production but grew over 147% year over year; TeraWulf's BTC production fell sharply year over year while its business focus is also shifting.

So for public miners, there is no single "best metric" that answers every question alone. What makes a production ranking valuable is helping you quickly find anomalies worth deeper study: who suddenly grew? Who fell fast? Who has large hashrate without proportional BTC? Who mines little but at lower cost? Those questions are the entry points to keep reading filings and operating data.

From "Who Mines the Most" to "Who Mines More Efficiently"

In Q2 2026, among the 14 public miners Nonce Insights included in BTC production statistics, Bitdeer ranked first at 2,694 BTC, MARA second at 2,422 BTC, CleanSpark third at 1,925 BTC, Riot fourth at 1,587 BTC, and HIVE fifth at 1,004 BTC; the 14 companies together produced about 12,861.5 BTC. Full rankings and the latest quarterly data can be followed continuously on Nonce Insights.

But the most important information on this ranking is not "who is number one." For miners, farm operators, and people researching public miners, what is more worth tracking is how a company turns power, miners, and hashrate into BTC—and whether that conversion efficiency can last.

When you see production rise, keep checking operating hashrate; when hashrate rises, consider network difficulty and actual runtime; when you see large BTC output, also check power price, fleet efficiency, and cost per coin. Only by combining these data can you truly separate "larger scale" from "more efficient mining."

So when reading public miner production rankings, rather than only asking "who mined the most coins," keep asking a more important question: as network hashrate and mining difficulty keep changing, who can keep earning BTC with more stable effective hashrate and more reasonable cost?

That is what makes miner production rankings truly worth reading.