MARA ended 2025 with roughly 53,822 BTC on its books, CCN reported. By late March and early April 2026, it had sold 15,133 BTC between March 4 and March 25, cutting that treasury by about 28%.

The proceeds went mainly to repurchase about $1 billion of 0% convertible senior notes due in 2030 and 2031, CCN said. MARA said in a March 27 press release that the move was a “strategic capital allocation” decision meant to strengthen the balance sheet and position the company for long-term growth, according to CCN reported.

The logic is straightforward enough. MARA is trading some of its most volatile assets for a cleaner capital structure. Bitcoin can swing violently; debt does not care about the mood of the market. For a miner trying to fund a pivot into data centers and AI, reducing use while keeping a large Bitcoin stash still intact is a very different proposition from the old hold-everything doctrine.

The company’s filing shows how far that doctrine has already eroded. MARA widened its treasury policy for 2026 to allow sales of accumulated Bitcoin, after first permitting sales of newly mined coins in the second half of 2025, Longbridge reported in early March. That was the quiet turn. The March sale simply made the shift impossible to miss.

The financial pressure behind it was not subtle. MARA reported a full-year net loss of about $1.3 billion, with Q4 2025 alone showing a $1.71 billion loss tied largely to non-cash fair-value impairments on digital assets, CCN reported. Revenue for the quarter fell 6% year over year to $202.3 million, despite a larger mining footprint.

The layoffs were confirmed on April 2 and carried out in waves over two days, Blockspace reported. They affected full-time staff across multiple departments and may also have included contractors. One source told Blockspace the cuts were deep enough that entire teams could disappear.

CEO Fred Thiel framed the decision as more than an accounting response. In an internal memo shared with Blockspace, he said the move was “not purely a financial decision,” but part of a strategic shift tied to recent announcements with Starwood and Exaion. Affected employees were told they would receive one month of paid leave, benefits through April 30, 13 weeks of severance, and payout for unused paid time off, Blockspace reported.

This is the part that deserves to be said plainly. MARA is swapping a balance sheet stuffed with bitcoin exposure for a lower-use operating model built around infrastructure. The old model depended on holding mined coins and hoping the next cycle would take care of the rest. The new one asks investors to believe the company can earn steadier returns from energy, compute, and facilities. Less crypto hoard, more hard assets. Less faith, more plumbing.

The transition comes with a 2.5 GW AI data center joint venture and a near-term target of 1 GW of IT capacity, with the first 100 MW of energized AI infrastructure expected by Q3 2026, MarketMinute and BitcoinEthereumNews reported in late March. MARA also plans to design its sites so they can toggle between Bitcoin mining and AI compute, depending on which use is more economical at the moment.

Investors have not quite decided what to make of that. Shares jumped 12% in early trading after the debt retirement announcement, MarketMinute reported. But they had already fallen 8.4% earlier in March, when the strategy change first came into view, BitcoinEthereumNews said. That is usually what hesitation looks like.

MARA’s move also reflects the economics of mining in 2026. The April 2024 halving cut block rewards to 3.125 BTC, and miners have been dealing with tighter margins ever since, CCN reported. MARA itself mined 8,799 BTC in 2025, down 7% from the previous year, even as its energized hashrate climbed to 66.4 EH/s, Longbridge reported in early March.

That is the trap the industry is walking into. More machines do not automatically mean better returns when the reward per block has been cut and competition keeps rising. Some operators now face mining costs around $87,000 per Bitcoin, BitcoinEthereumNews reported in late March, which makes the business look less like production and more like an expensive habit.

MARA’s sale also changed something structural. For the first time, production and accumulation have fully decoupled, BitcoinEthereumNews reported. That is a meaningful break from the old HODL-first identity. Miners used to treat their treasury as the sacred cow. MARA has started turning that cow into working capital.

The company is not making this turn in a vacuum. Core Scientific sold its entire Bitcoin treasury, 2,537 BTC, in March 2026 and then secured a $500 million loan from Morgan Stanley to fund AI data center construction, BitcoinEthereumNews reported.

IREN, formerly Iris Energy, has essentially exited the Bitcoin reserve business and is targeting $3.6 billion in AI expansion. It has already deployed more than 23,000 Nvidia GPUs and signed a contract with Microsoft, BitcoinEthereumNews said. TeraWulf has signed more than $12.8 billion in long-term AI customer agreements, and some analysts expect it to shut down Bitcoin mining entirely by the end of 2026, BitcoinEthereumNews reported.

The holdouts are under pressure too. Cango ran its fleet 30% below installed capacity in February, with hashprice in the low-$30 range against operating costs near $40 per PH/s, and sold 4,616 BTC that month, more than 10 times its production, Blockonomi and The Miner Mag reported in early March. Riot Platforms recorded a $663 million net loss in 2025 and is under pressure from Starboard Value to accelerate $1.6 billion in AI investment, BitcoinEthereumNews reported.

CCN said listed miners could derive as much as 70% of their revenue from AI-related operations by the end of 2026. That may be optimistic. Still, the direction of travel is hard to miss.

MARA still holds more than 38,689 BTC after the sale, BitcoinEthereumNews reported, so it remains exposed to Bitcoin’s price in the near term. The bigger question is whether the company can turn its new infrastructure ambition into actual revenue before the market gets bored with the story. The first test arrives in Q3 2026, when the company expects its first 100 MW of energized AI capacity to come online.