American Bitcoin lost money again in the second quarter, and kept buying bitcoin anyway. The Trump-family-backed miner reported a net loss of $57.2m for the three months to June, narrower than the $81.8m loss it booked the quarter before.
Mining revenue rose 8% to $67m, and the company produced a record 932 bitcoin over the period. The loss shrank, but a loss it remained, and the first half of 2026 now sits more than $139m in the red.
The strategy behind the figures is to mine and hold rather than sell. American Bitcoin ended June with 8,002 bitcoin on its balance sheet, up 14% on the quarter, with a further 3,090 coins pledged under equipment agreements with the rig maker Bitmain, whose specialised machines are a long way from the mining hardware that ran the early network.
The company is a newcomer built on older foundations. It was created in March 2025 by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr, and listed on Nasdaq under the ticker ABTC after an all-stock merger with Gryphon Digital Mining last September.
Its parentage is central to the model. American Bitcoin operates as a majority-owned subsidiary of the North American miner Hut 8, and rather than build data centres of its own it runs on Hut 8’s existing infrastructure, which is meant to give it lower costs than a mining firm starting from scratch.
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The mine-and-hold approach places American Bitcoin in a fast-growing category of companies that treat bitcoin less as a product to sell than as a reserve to accumulate. It now ranks around 16th among corporate bitcoin holders.
The venture is one strand of the family’s widening crypto footprint. Donald Trump reported roughly $1.4bn in crypto income on a recent financial disclosure, with digital assets overtaking property as a source of reported earnings.
Going public was itself a shortcut. Rather than run a traditional listing, American Bitcoin reversed into Gryphon Digital Mining, a smaller listed miner, a route that reached Nasdaq quickly but carried the baggage of a struggling shell.
Losses of this size are not unusual for the sector. Bitcoin mining is a business of heavy upfront spending on machines and electricity, and the economics turn sharply on the bitcoin price and on the periodic halving that cuts the reward paid for each block mined.
The wider industry has spent 2026 under pressure. The 2024 halving cut block rewards, energy costs have stayed high, and miners have leaned on bitcoin treasuries and pivots into AI data centres to give investors a growth story to hold on to.
Keeping the machines current is its own constant drain. A mining fleet is a depreciating asset in a field where each new generation of rig is faster and more efficient, so the capital spending rarely stops for long.
The market has not rewarded the effort. American Bitcoin ran a 1-for-15 reverse stock split last month to stay compliant with Nasdaq’s listing rules, and the shares closed the week down more than 6%.
The long-standing promise that mining could be a business open to everyone has always sat awkwardly with the reality, which is capital-intensive, energy-hungry, and unforgiving when the price dips.
That reality raises the obvious question about sustainability. Two consecutive quarters of heavy losses invite scrutiny, even for a company that can lean on a larger parent’s cost base to soften the blow.
Everything, in the end, rides on the bitcoin price. A treasury of 8,000 coins is a large unrealised gain in a rising market and a heavy weight in a falling one, which makes the balance sheet as much a bet on bitcoin as on the mining business beneath it.
For now, American Bitcoin is doing exactly what it said it would: turning revenue and fresh capital into more bitcoin, and booking losses while it does. Whether that reads as conviction or exposure depends almost entirely on where the price goes next.
