MARA Holdings liquidates Bitcoin to fund AI expansion and reduce debt, while JPMorgan records three consecutive months of inflows into Bitcoin ETFs.
The contradiction is now plain to see within the Bitcoin treasury ecosystem itself. MARA Holdings sold 20,880 Bitcoin worth $1.5 billion in the first quarter of 2026, as revealed by financial results published on May 12. The move came as JPMorgan declared that Bitcoin was gaining ground at gold’s expense, fueling the so-called “debasement trade.” At the same time, Bitcoin climbed roughly 30% over the past two months, rising from a low of around $62,000 in February to approximately $80,621 by May 12.
MARA’s quarterly results paint a clear picture: the company used $1 billion of the proceeds to repay roughly 30% of its convertible debt, reducing obligations from $3.3 billion to $2.3 billion. MARA reported a net loss of $1.26 billion and dropped from second to fourth place among public companies ranked by Bitcoin holdings. CFO Salman Khan stated during the analyst call: “Bitcoin is not just a reserve asset on our balance sheet; it is also a source of strategic financial flexibility.”
The proceeds from the sale are funding the largest acquisition in MARA’s history: a $1.5 billion deal for the Long Ridge Energy & Power campus in Ohio, which includes a 505-megawatt gas-fired power plant and 1,600 acres earmarked for artificial intelligence data center development. The company plans to allocate up to 90% of its mining capacity to AI workloads. This development fits into a broader trend: publicly listed miners collectively sold more than 32,000 BTC in the first quarter of 2026, exceeding the total miner sales for all of 2025.
On the opposite side stand analysts at JPMorgan, led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, who note that spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded inflows for three consecutive months through May, while gold ETFs are still struggling to recover from the outflows that followed the Iran conflict in March. The bank argues that “Bitcoin is rising at gold’s expense.” Adding weight to the broader thesis is Ray Dalio, who in a Forbes interview stated: “Looking at history, we see that in all these periods all fiat currencies decline. And gold rises. I don’t think any of the fiat currencies will be an effective store of value.” The backdrop is a U.S. federal debt surpassing $39 trillion.
