Bitcoin Miners Crashed 15–20% in a Day While BTC Fell Just 5.5%: the AI Pivot Backfired — 6 Stocks Ranked

Bitcoin Fell 5.5%. Its Miners Fell Three Times Harder.

Bitcoin dropped 5.5% to $75,800 on Thursday, November 5, 2026 — a bad day, but not a disaster. The real damage was one layer up the food chain: the Bitcoin miners who spent the last two years reinventing themselves as AI data-center companies lost 13% to 18% in a single session. Keel Infrastructure fell 18%. MARA Holdings fell 15%. Cipher Mining, IREN, Bitdeer, TeraWulf and CleanSpark all fell more than 13%. The trade that was supposed to save Bitcoin mining — pivot to AI, escape Bitcoin's price swings — just proved it can hurt far worse than the thing it replaced. More than $1 billion in leveraged bets was liquidated, the total crypto market lost $137.6 billion in a day, and one prominent buyer was doing the opposite of everyone else: Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz was buying more of his own company's stock into the selloff. This article ranks the six hardest-hit miners, explains why the AI pivot backfired, and lays out the three scenarios that decide what happens next.

What Happened on Thursday, November 5

Wall Street's AI trade broke on Thursday. The Nasdaq Composite sank nearly 6%, on track for its worst day since the tariff-driven crash of April 2025, while the S&P 500 fell more than 3% and the Dow dropped over 2%. A chip-sector index plunged more than 10% in early trading: AMD and Micron each fell more than 12%, Qualcomm dropped 10.6%, Intel fell 6%, Broadcom fell 4.6% and Nvidia fell 3.9%. The trigger, according to analysts at FalconX and GSR cited by CoinDesk, was the fallout from Tuesday's US midterm elections: Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress, and investors began to fear that greater political opposition could slow the construction of the data centers powering the AI boom.

Bitcoin was dragged down with the rest of risk assets. BTC fell below $76,000, touching an intraday low of $75,568 before recovering to around $76,830, a 24-hour decline of roughly 5.5%. Ether fell harder, dropping about 7% to $2,250. Solana slid 6% to $90.58, XRP fell 4.8% to $1.25 and Hyperliquid dropped 7.5%. The total crypto market capitalization fell to approximately $2.53 trillion, a decline of $137.6 billion, or 5.16%, on the day, according to TradingView data cited by TheStreet.

The leverage washout was severe. More than $1 billion in crypto derivatives positions was liquidated over 24 hours, according to CoinGlass data, with most of the losses coming from bullish bets — the largest wipeout since at least October 28–29, when Bitcoin tumbled from nearly $82,000 to $76,000. At one point, roughly $878 million in liquidations hit in just four hours, including $798 million in long positions. For readers who want the mechanics of how these cascades work, our explainer Crypto Liquidations Explained: $1 Billion Wiped Out in 24 Hours breaks down why forced selling accelerates exactly when buyers disappear.

Here is the number that frames everything else in this article: Bitcoin fell 5.5%. The Nasdaq fell about 6%. And the miners fell 13% to 18%. Bitcoin — the asset everyone calls volatile — was the most resilient thing in the room. That inversion is the whole story.

The 6 Hardest-Hit Miners, Ranked

Not every miner fell equally, and the ranking tells you exactly what the market was pricing. The worst losses belonged to the companies furthest along the AI pivot — the ones whose valuations now depend on data-center contracts and AI infrastructure spending, not on the Bitcoin they mine.

Company	Ticker	Thursday's Drop	What the Market Priced In
Keel Infrastructure	KEEL	-17% to -18%	Exiting mining entirely; sold 2,520 BTC for $192M
MARA Holdings	MARA	-15%	Largest public miner; heavy AI data-center exposure
Cipher Mining	CIFR	-14.4%	AI hosting pivot; data-center lease revenue at risk
IREN	IREN	-14.3%	AI cloud services now core to the valuation
Bitdeer	BTDR	-14.1%	AI infrastructure buildout; chip demand fears
TeraWulf	WULF	-13.8%	AI data-center deals dominate the investment case

Just outside the top six, CleanSpark fell 13.3%, Riot Platforms fell 13%, Hut 8 fell 11% and Hive Digital fell 11%. The pattern is unmistakable: the deeper a miner's AI pivot, the harder it fell. The pure-play Bitcoin exposure — Bitcoin itself — fell 5.5%. The "diversified" AI-mining hybrids fell roughly three times as much.

The same logic hit the rest of the crypto equity complex. Coinbase fell 7.8% to 11% to $138.08, Circle fell 10% to 13% to $69.10, Strategy (MSTR) lost 9.6% to 10.1% to $129.38, Robinhood fell 10% to 11% to $78.16, Bullish fell 7.7% to $20.53, and digital-asset custodian BitGo fell 10% to 15% to $4.69. Galaxy Digital fell about 8% by the close — which is where the day's most interesting trade begins, as we will see below.

Why the AI Pivot Backfired in a Single Day

To understand Thursday, you have to understand what Bitcoin miners did over the last two years. Mining Bitcoin got brutally competitive: hashprice — the revenue a miner earns per unit of computing power — fell 17.5% even as miners collectively earned $1.215 billion in a recent month, as our earlier piece Is Bitcoin Mining Profitable in November 2026? documented. Difficulty kept rising, margins kept compressing, and the rational response was to sell the computing power to someone else — the AI industry, which would pay a premium for exactly the same ingredients miners already owned: cheap power, industrial sites, cooling and grid connections.

The pivot was enormous. Riot Platforms sold 79% of its Bitcoin for a $28 billion AI bet. Keel Infrastructure sold 2,520 BTC for $192 million as it exits mining altogether. Across the sector, miners signed AI hosting deals, rebranded as infrastructure companies and watched their share prices re-rate upward on AI multiples instead of mining multiples. For a while it worked beautifully.

Thursday exposed the other side of that trade. When the market decided the AI data-center buildout itself might slow — because a Democratic Congress could scrutinize data-center construction, permits and energy use more aggressively — the miners did not get to hide behind Bitcoin. They got hit as AI stocks first and Bitcoin miners second. A miner that earns its money from AI hosting contracts is, on a day like Thursday, an AI stock with extra steps. The irony is sharp: the pivot was designed to escape Bitcoin's volatility, and on the first real stress test it delivered three times Bitcoin's volatility instead.

There is a second, quieter mechanism at work. Several miners still hold large Bitcoin treasuries, and falling prices force ugly choices: sell BTC into weakness to fund operations, or hold and burn cash. Strategy's own position illustrates how thin the cushion has become — as we reported in Strategy's Bitcoin Is Just 2% Above Water, its average cost sits near $75,446, meaning Thursday's low of $75,568 came within roughly $100 of the line where its entire 849,327-BTC treasury slips underwater.

What Most People Get Wrong About Thursday

The selloff produced three confident-sounding conclusions on social media within hours. All three are wrong, and correcting them matters more than the price action itself.

Myth 1: "Miners are a leveraged bet on Bitcoin." That was true in 2021. It is not true in November 2026. A leveraged Bitcoin bet would have fallen roughly in line with Bitcoin, amplified by debt. The miners fell 13% to 18% while Bitcoin fell 5.5% — a ratio no amount of operating leverage explains, because mining revenue did not fall 18% in a day. What fell was the AI premium: the market re-priced the data-center contracts, the hosting revenue and the AI multiples. If you bought a miner stock this year thinking you were buying Bitcoin with leverage, Thursday was the day you discovered you had actually bought an AI infrastructure stock. The two assets have decoupled, and investors need to price them separately from now on.

Myth 2: "Bitcoin crashed because the AI bubble burst." Bitcoin fell 5.5% on a day the Nasdaq fell 6% and chip stocks fell more than 10%. That is not a crypto-specific crash; it is Bitcoin behaving like a high-beta risk asset in a broad de-risking event — and, notably, holding up better than the equity benchmarks it is usually compared against. Contrast that with gold, which also fell on Thursday. As our Bitcoin vs Gold in November 2026 analysis showed, both assets are having a miserable year — but Bitcoin's 24-hour decline was smaller than the Nasdaq's, which is not what "Bitcoin crashed" sounds like. Wintermute trader De Maere made the same point to CoinDesk: crypto's relative resilience and growing adoption are reasons for optimism, not panic.

Myth 3: "The miners' AI pivot is dead." One bad day does not kill a multi-year infrastructure shift. The AI buildout faces political scrutiny, not cancellation: data centers are still being permitted, chips are still being ordered and hyperscalers are still spending. What Thursday killed was the assumption that the AI pivot was a one-way hedge — that miners could keep the upside of AI multiples while keeping Bitcoin's downside protection. The pivot is alive; the free lunch is dead. Miners will now be judged the way any infrastructure company is judged: on signed contracts, utilization rates and power costs, not on vibes about AI.

The One Buyer Stepping In: Novogratz Buys the Galaxy Dip

While the market sold everything crypto-adjacent, Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz did the opposite. He announced on Thursday that he is adding to his GLXY holdings after Galaxy shares fell approximately 8% by the close, pointing to long-term growth in onchain finance and AI demand as generational trends that would continue across political administrations and market cycles, according to PrimeXBT. It is a small data point — one insider buying his own stock — but it is the kind of data point that matters on capitulation days. Insiders sell into strength; they buy when they believe the market has overshot.

Novogratz's logic is worth taking seriously because it cuts against both tribes. To the Bitcoin maximalists who say AI is a distraction, he is saying the AI demand story is real and durable. To the AI skeptics who say the data-center boom is a bubble, he is saying the trend survives political cycles. His bet is that the intersection — onchain finance plus AI infrastructure — is where the next cycle's value accrues.

There is a second contrarian signal hiding in the derivatives data. The $1 billion liquidation flush cleared out leveraged longs — the same kind of flush that preceded Bitcoin's reclaim of $80,000 after the October 28–29 wipeout. Liquidations are painful for the people liquidated, but they reset the market: fewer leveraged longs means less forced selling on the next dip. The market that emerges from a $1 billion flush is, mechanically, a healthier market than the one that entered it.

Three Scenarios for What Happens Next

Thursday's selloff sets up a clean decision tree. The levels below are drawn from the market structure traders are actually watching: the $80,000–$82,000 resistance zone, the $75,000–$76,000 support band, and Friday's options expiry, where 33,504 BTC in Deribit contracts expire with max pain at $79,000.

Scenario	Trigger	Bitcoin Level	Miner Stocks
Bull: AI fear fades	Data-center scrutiny proves to be rhetoric; Nasdaq stabilizes	Reclaims $80,000, tests $82,000	Miners bounce hardest — 10%+ snapback, KEEL and MARA lead
Base: sideways chop	No fresh catalyst; Friday expiry pins BTC near $79,000 max pain	$75,000–$80,000 range	Miners lag; AI premium stays compressed, selective buying
Bear: contagion spreads	AI capex cuts confirmed; BTC breaks $75,000 support	$70,000–$73,000	Miners fall another 10–15%; Strategy's $75,446 line breaks

The base case deserves the most weight. Polymarket's November 6 median sits at $79,581 with an interquartile range of $78,419–$80,998, and the options market is priced for a quiet Friday around the $79,000 max-pain level. The market's own pricing says: Thursday was a shock, not a trend change — yet. But the bear case is not far away. Bitcoin is only about $100–$500 above the levels where Strategy's treasury goes underwater and where short-term holders have already logged heavy losses, and a break of $75,000 would turn a one-day selloff into a structural problem for every miner still holding Bitcoin on its balance sheet.

Two dates decide which scenario wins. First, Friday's jobs report and the $2.65 billion options expiry will set the tone for the weekend. Second, November 11 brings the MSCI index decision on Strategy — a potential $2.8 billion in passive selling if the index provider follows through on removing MSTR, as covered in our earlier reporting. Between those two dates, watch the miners, not Bitcoin: if KEEL, MARA and IREN stabilize while Bitcoin chops sideways, the AI fear is fading. If they keep making new lows while Bitcoin holds $76,000, the market is telling you the AI story is the problem, not crypto.

What This Means If You Hold BTC, MSTR or a Miner Stock

Thursday changed the facts for three different groups of holders. Here is the checklist for each — not financial advice, but the questions every holder should be able to answer before Monday's open.

• If you hold Bitcoin itself: your asset fell 5.5% and outperformed the Nasdaq. Check whether your thesis was "Bitcoin as digital gold" or "Bitcoin as a tech stock" — Thursday rewarded the first thesis and punished the second, and the difference decides whether you buy this dip or wait for $70,000.
• If you hold Strategy (MSTR) stock: know your two numbers — Bitcoin at $75,568 came within $122 of Strategy's $75,446 average cost, and November 11 is the MSCI decision date. Read Strategy's $19.5B Profit Is Paper: MSTR vs Bitcoin before deciding whether you own a Bitcoin proxy or a leveraged equity story.
• If you hold a miner stock: ask what percentage of the company's revenue comes from AI hosting versus mining, and when its data-center contracts renew. A miner with signed multi-year AI leases is a different asset from one still hoping to sign them — Thursday punished the hopers most.
• If you are thinking of buying the dip: the Fear and Greed Index sat at 34–35 (Fear) on November 4, and fear is usually the better entry than euphoria. Our guide What Is the Crypto Fear and Greed Index? explains how to read it without letting it read you — but size any position for the bear case, not the bull case.
• If you are new to crypto entirely: start with the basics before touching a miner stock. What Is Bitcoin? and How to Buy Bitcoin in 2026 cover the ground, and Is Bitcoin a Good Investment in 2026? gives an honest account of the risks — including days exactly like Thursday.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did Bitcoin mining stocks fall more than Bitcoin on November 5, 2026?

Because the market stopped pricing miners as Bitcoin proxies and started pricing them as AI infrastructure stocks. The selloff was triggered by fears that a Democratic Congress could slow AI data-center construction, which hit the miners' AI hosting revenue directly. Keel fell 18% and MARA 15% while Bitcoin fell 5.5% — the AI premium, not Bitcoin, was what collapsed.

Which Bitcoin miners fell the most on Thursday?

Keel Infrastructure (KEEL) fell 17–18%, MARA Holdings fell 15%, Cipher Mining fell 14.4%, IREN fell 14.3%, Bitdeer fell 14.1% and TeraWulf fell 13.8%. CleanSpark fell 13.3% and Riot Platforms fell 13%. The worst losses went to the miners furthest along the AI pivot.

Is the miners' AI pivot a mistake?

Not necessarily — but Thursday proved it is not a hedge. The pivot trades Bitcoin's volatility for AI-sector volatility, and on November 5 that meant falling three times as far as Bitcoin. The pivot makes sense for miners with signed, multi-year data-center contracts; it is dangerous for miners whose AI revenue is still mostly promises. The next two earnings seasons will separate the two groups.

How much was liquidated in the November 5 crypto selloff?

More than $1 billion in crypto derivatives positions was liquidated in 24 hours, according to CoinGlass, mostly from bullish long positions — the largest wipeout since October 28–29. At one point $878 million was liquidated in just four hours, including $798 million in longs.

Did Bitcoin fall more than the stock market?

No. Bitcoin fell about 5.5% while the Nasdaq fell nearly 6% and a chip-sector index plunged more than 10%. Ether fell about 7%, in line with the Nasdaq. Bitcoin was, unusually, the most resilient major risk asset in the room — a fact that matters more than the red number itself.

What should I watch next after the miner crash?

Three things: whether miners stabilize while Bitcoin holds $76,000 (a sign the AI fear is fading), Friday's $2.65 billion Bitcoin options expiry with max pain at $79,000, and the November 11 MSCI decision on Strategy, which could trigger $2.8 billion in passive selling. If miners keep making new lows while Bitcoin holds, the AI story — not crypto — is the problem.

Conclusion

Thursday, November 5, 2026 will be remembered as the day Bitcoin's miners discovered their hedge was a leverage trade in disguise. Bitcoin fell 5.5% to $75,800 — painful, but better than the Nasdaq's 6% slide. The miners who bet billions on AI data centers fell 13% to 18%, Keel worst of all at 18%, and $1 billion in leveraged crypto bets was wiped out in the process. The AI pivot is not dead, but the idea that it protects miners from volatility is. From here, miners will be judged as what they have become: AI infrastructure companies that happen to own Bitcoin mines, with all the political and capex risk that implies. The tell over the next week is simple — if the miners stabilize while Bitcoin holds $76,000, Thursday was a shock. If they keep falling while Bitcoin holds, the market has decided the AI story itself is the risk.