Crypto Biz: Bitcoin miners face tariff hit, blockchain courts Wall Street
The U.S. trade dispute has landed hard on the Bitcoin mining industry, with several public miners now confronting nine‑figure tariff bills from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Reports say companies including CleanSpark and IREN have been notified of potential liabilities in the hundreds of millions of dollars after regulators determined some mining rigs were of Chinese origin and thus subject to newly revised duties.
Under the updated U.S. tariff schedule, certain imported mining equipment can carry an effective duty rate of 57.6%, a levy that — according to industry reporting — has produced invoices that could top $100 million for individual firms. The development comes as mining revenues are already strained, with transaction fees falling to a small fraction of block rewards.
Despite the tariff headwinds, mining operations continued producing Bitcoin in July: production data show several large miners each mined hundreds of BTC during the month, with companies like IREN and Mara Holdings recording output above 700 BTC and others generating in the 600+ BTC range.
Meanwhile, the broader blockchain sector is stepping up efforts to attract institutional capital. Polkadot has launched a new capital markets arm — Polkadot Capital Group — based in the Cayman Islands, designed to present the chain’s decentralized finance, staking and real‑world asset use cases to traditional finance firms and help ease institutional entrance into crypto markets.
On the stablecoin front, authorities in Beijing are reportedly weighing the controlled approval of yuan‑backed stablecoins as part of a strategy to expand the yuan’s role in international trade. That potential policy shift would mark a significant change from prior years, when China imposed sweeping restrictions on crypto trading and mining.
Corporate treasury activity in crypto also grabbed headlines: SharpLink, a sports‑betting firm that uses Ether as a treasury asset, reportedly added a substantial amount of ETH — hundreds of thousands of tokens — in a purchase valued at several hundred million dollars, bringing its total Ether holdings into the hundreds of thousands. Other corporate and institutional treasuries continue to accumulate Ether as market appetite and price momentum remain notable.
These stories underline two parallel themes in the current crypto landscape: regulatory and trade pressures that can rapidly alter the economics of mining hardware and operations, and a simultaneous push by projects and companies to court institutional investors through dedicated capital markets efforts, treasury allocations and developments in tokenized real‑world assets.
