Canaan Inc. shares surged over 26% in early trading on Thursday following a substantial order for 50,000 mining rigs.
Canaan announced that a company based in the U.S. acquired the cutting-edge “Avalon A15 Pro” mining machines, designed for institutional-grade Bitcoin mining. The identity of the buyer remains undisclosed, but this sale is noted as Canaan’s most significant in over three years.
Nangeng Zhang, the company’s CEO, remarked that this transaction reflects the mutual “confidence in the long-term growth” of Bitcoin mining along with the increasing “demand for highly efficient, next-generation infrastructure.”
According to the Hashrate Index, the United States now represents 36% of the global Bitcoin hashrate, the total computational power used by miners to protect the network, establishing itself as the premier mining hub worldwide.
Canaan, a cryptocurrency mining hardware firm established in Beijing in 2013, reported a 26.4% increase in its shares, reaching $1.31 on Nasdaq at the time of writing, according to Yahoo Finance.
Over the past six months, shares have risen by more than 50%, yet have seen a decline of 40% year-to-date.
The Current State of Bitcoin Mining
Bitcoin mining utilizes computational power to authenticate transactions and integrate new blocks into the blockchain, rewarding miners with newly generated Bitcoin while ensuring network security.
This process introduces new coins into circulation, but it becomes increasingly challenging over time as the network heightens difficulty approximately every two weeks, or every 2,016 blocks, and reduces block rewards roughly every four years.
In August 2025, mining difficulty reached a historic high of 127.6 trillion, rising again to 134.7 trillion by September 5. As of Thursday, the difficulty rate escalated to 150.84 trillion, indicating that Bitcoin is now harder to mine than ever before.
The rising difficulty and related costs have forced some companies to exit the market. In June 2025, Bit Digital announced it would cease its Bitcoin mining operations to pivot toward an Ethereum-based treasury strategy.
CEO Sam Tabar told Cointelegraph that he believes the “Bitcoin mining industry will be extinct in two years,” stressing that “the mining sector cannot withstand another halving.”
The escalating challenges of Bitcoin mining have resulted in greater dominance by large institutional miners. A recent report from The Miner Mag revealed that the top four public miners — MARA, IREN, Cango, and CleanSpark — were responsible for 19.07% of total block rewards in July.
However, individual miners still occasionally manage to mine blocks successfully. On July 3, a solo miner created block 903,883, earning nearly $350,000 from the block reward along with user transaction fees for quicker confirmation.
Shortly after, another solo miner secured more than $373,000 in rewards based on Bitcoin’s price that day after mining block 907,283.
Magazine: Bitcoin vs. the quantum computer threat — Timeline and solutions (2025–2035)
