Key Takeaways:

• Bitcoin mining stocks have dramatically outperformed BTC itself in 2026, with most of the top ten publicly listed mining organizations posting year-to-date (YTD) gains of 25–73% while bitcoin sits roughly 12% in the red since January 1.
• The outperformance is not a mining story; it’s an artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure story. The leaders have collectively locked in tens of billions in contracted HPC revenue through long-term hyperscaler deals, effectively revaluing themselves as data center operators.
• Terawulf (WULF) leads the top ten public miners with a 73.58% YTD gain after securing over $12.8 billion in contracted HPC revenue, with deals anchored by Google-backed Fluidstack and Core42 across sites totaling over 1 GW of available power.

Anthropic and Google Are Signing Billion-Dollar Leases With Bitcoin Miners

Most of the ten largest publicly traded miners have outpaced the underlying asset by a wide margin. Terawulf (Nasdaq: WULF) leads the group with a 73.58% gain YTD. Hut 8 Corp. (Nasdaq: HUT) follows at 67.75%, trading at $77.06, the highest share price among the top ten listed miners by market valuation.

Riot Platforms (Nasdaq: RIOT) is up 47.04%, and both Applied Digital (Nasdaq: APLD) and Core Scientific (Nasdaq: CORZ) are sitting on gains above 40%. These aren’t modest beats. These are companies posting equity gains four to six times larger than bitcoin’s move, in the opposite direction. The reason is AI.

The sector has undergone a fundamental repositioning in early 2026. Miners carry assets that hyperscalers urgently want: access to low-cost power, industrial-scale sites, and grid expertise. Companies that have moved quickly to convert that infrastructure into AI and high-performance computing (HPC) data centers have been rewarded. Those that haven’t are being left behind.

Miners already had the hardest parts figured out when they started mining bitcoin. They’ve spent years solving problems that would take a traditional real estate developer or tech company years to replicate: permitting large power loads, negotiating with utilities, building out substations, managing heat dissipation at scale, and running 24/7 operations with high uptime requirements. Those aren’t small things. Power procurement alone can take years and can halt most data center projects before they start.

Terawulf is the clearest example of the trade working. The company has locked in over $12.8 billion in contracted HPC revenue through long-term leases with Google-backed Fluidstack and Core42, with sites in Hawesville, Kentucky, and Morgantown, Maryland, scaling toward 1 GW of available power. HPC now drives over half of annual revenues. The stock reflects it.

Hut 8 has taken a similar path, anchoring a $7 billion, 15-year lease at its River Bend campus with Anthropic and Fluidstack as counterparties, while building an 8.5 GW development pipeline across due diligence, exclusivity, and active construction stages.

Core Scientific has also seen similar execution. The company has secured roughly $10–12 billion in contracted revenue through Coreweave partnerships spanning 590 MW of critical IT load across six sites, including a $1.2 billion expansion in Denton, Texas. Analysts forecast HPC driving approximately 70% of 2026 revenue.

Applied Digital has signed multiple 15-year leases with Coreweave for 400 MW of critical IT load at its North Dakota campus, generating roughly $11 billion in contracted revenue and running HPC hosting margins above 25%. IREN Limited (IREN), sitting atop the top ten list by market cap at $16.71 billion, has a Microsoft AI cloud partnership valued in the billions and a 4.5 GW power pipeline, with HPC revenue projected to reach 71% of total by year-end.

Cipher Digital (Nasdaq: CIFR), now fully rebranded from Cipher Mining, has exited most of its bitcoin operations entirely, replacing them with a $9.3 billion contracted HPC backlog anchored by a 300 MW AWS deal and a Google-backstopped Fluidstack agreement.

Not every name is at the same stage, and that’s not necessarily a problem. MARA Holdings (MARA) and Riot Platforms (RIOT) are posting YTD returns of 29.56% and 47.04%, respectively. Solid numbers by any standard, even if they sit below the group leaders. Both companies are moving, just on a slightly different timeline.

Riot holds 1.7 GW of power capacity across its Texas sites, including Corsicana and Rockdale, and has begun construction of 112 MW of AI-ready core-and-shell capacity at Corsicana as part of a planned 600 MW buildout. MARA is taking a different approach, building international exposure through its majority stake in Exaion, an EDF subsidiary that brings European AI and HPC cloud expertise into the fold.

Bitdeer (Nasdaq: BTDR) sits at the bottom of the year-to-date table at just 7.62%, still down 6.40% over the past five trading days. The company is building what it describes as Norway’s largest AI data center. A 180 MW facility in Tydal targeting Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs, and is converting sites in Ohio and Washington State, but the pipeline hasn’t translated into contracted revenue at the scale investors are rewarding elsewhere.

Cleanspark (Nasdaq: CLSK), up 25.88% YTD, is further along than Bitdeer with over 1.8 GW of power under contract and advanced discussions with hyperscale tenants, but initial AI deployments aren’t targeted until 2026–2027.

The takeaway from January through April is straightforward. The miners winning in 2026 are the ones that closed hyperscaler deals first. Power capacity alone isn’t enough — the market is pricing contracted backlog, delivery timelines, and the quality of counterparties. Terawulf, Hut 8, Core Scientific, Applied Digital, IREN, and Cipher Digital have all demonstrated some version of that. Others are working to catch up. Bitcoin‘s price direction from here will matter, but for the leading names in this group, it’s becoming a secondary consideration.

The FBI has joined an investigation into the suspicious disappearance of a Southern California grandfather, which his family believes could be tied to their success in the cryptocurrency business.

Federal authorities recently became involved in the probe for missing Rancho Cucamonga resident Naiping Hou, 74, who is the father of noted hedge fund and cryptocurrency investor Wen Hou. The son serves as the chief investment officer at Coincident Capital. In 2022, Wen Hou and his wife, who live in Las Vegas, contributed $1.1 million in cryptocurrency to the USC Keck School of Medicine to help fund research on heart disease.

Naiping Hou was last seen in his hometown on March 18, 2025. He was officially reported missing on May 4, 2025, after which detectives determined someone impersonated him using his cellphone for over a month.

“Possible foul play is suspected, as his bank accounts were depleted prior to law enforcement being notified about his disappearance,” the FBI officials said in a news release.

His loved ones previously told KABC that the kidnapping could be tied to the family’s success in crypto.

“I miss him a lot,” Wen Hou said about his father in July 2025. “He’s sort of a guide to my life.”

In a previous LA Times interview, Wen Hou said he became concerned about his father in April 2025 when his text messages in the family group chat began to feel robotic. Naiping Hou became increasingly withdrawn through the messages, less communicative and refused to visit his grandchildren, he claimed.

Wen Hou’s concerns escalated around his father’s May 3 birthday when he began to suspect that someone else may have been controlling his phone. He said his father declined to travel to Las Vegas to see family and did not respond to calls. Instead of reacting warmly to a gift of handmade Chinese noodles sent to his Rancho Cucamonga home, a text from Naiping Hou’s phone simply read, “Yes I received it.”

The out-of-state son asked family friends to check on his father the following day. Upon arrival, they reportedly found the unopened noodle package left on the doorstep. Inside the home, they discovered that the residence appeared to have been largely cleared out, with all furniture removed and a poorly done interior paint job.

Investigators determined that someone had been using Naiping Hou’s phone to impersonate him and carry out extensive fraudulent bank transactions, including purchasing gold bars online. Wen Hou said that was unusual since his father was not tech-savvy and had never bought gold before.

A tip website Wen Hou created to find his missing father remains active, offering a $250,000 reward.

Anyone with information on Naiping Hou’s case is asked to contact their local FBI office or the nearest American Embassy or Consulate.

Key Takeaways:

• Pasternak, 26, was charged with second-degree strangulation and third-degree assault over a March 31 incident; he has pleaded not guilty, with a court date set for June 11.
• A class action complaint alleges he “ran the same play three times” across PASTERNAK, LAUNCHCOIN, and BELIEVE, extracting $54M in fees from roughly $6B in trading volume.
• Pasternak was reportedly staying at a $2,000-per-night hotel to avoid civil lawsuit service at the time of his arrest.

Three Tokens, One Alleged Playbook

Pasternak founded Launchcoin, a Solana-based social token launchpad that allows users to launch tokens tied to online personalities and communities. The platform grew quickly, with Launchcoin’s native token reaching a peak market cap of $370 million before a forced migration reset the table for existing holders.

In October 2025, Pasternak announced Launchcoin would be retired and replaced with a new token called BELIEVE. The migration was mandatory, with a two-week conversion window. The swap created 333 million new tokens distributed to insider-linked wallets, shrinking existing holders’ stakes by roughly one third. Anyone who missed the October 29, 2025 deadline had their holdings permanently destroyed.

The class action complaint alleges the migration was not an upgrade but a structured reset engineered to extract fresh fees from a new base of holders. The filing states Pasternak “ran the same play three times, under three different token names,” pointing to PASTERNAK, LAUNCHCOIN, and BELIEVE as successive iterations of the same alleged scheme.

Across the full lifecycle of the platform, Believe processed roughly $6 billion in trading volume from which Pasternak allegedly extracted an estimated $54 million in fees. Consumer losses are estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The BELIEVE token now trades 99.8% below its all-time high of $0.35.

Arrest in New York as Legal Pressure Compounds

The criminal charges stem from a March 31 incident in New York. Pasternak faces one count of second-degree strangulation and two counts of third-degree assault with intent to cause physical injury. The victim has been widely identified online as Evelyn Ha, a Tiktok influencer whom Pasternak had been publicly dating since mid-2024. He has pleaded not guilty and his next court appearance is scheduled for June 11.

According to Wu Blockchain, Pasternak was staying at a hotel charging $2,000 per night at the time of the arrest, which prosecutors allege was in part an effort to avoid being served in the ongoing civil proceedings. The arrest places Pasternak under simultaneous pressure across criminal and civil jurisdictions. No formal criminal charges tied specifically to the token allegations have been filed.