How bitcoin miners raise money, and what each way costs a shareholder

Every way of raising money costs a shareholder one of three things.

A miner needs money for machines, buildings and power before any of them earn. It can get that money by selling a piece of the company, by borrowing, or by taking payment from a customer early. Each has one main cost to the person who already holds shares.

1. Selling shares costs ownership. Your fraction of the company gets smaller. The dilution article works this through.
2. Borrowing costs interest, and the lender is paid before you are. Nothing changes in your fraction unless the loan can turn into shares.
3. Taking a customer's money early costs future revenue. The company gets cash now and delivers later, at a price it has already agreed.

The five tools below are the ones that appear most in miners' filings. Each has a worked example from one filing, with the arithmetic shown so you can redo it on another. Most companies use several at once, and the mix changes with the share price: when the stock is high, selling shares is cheap in ownership terms; when it is low, borrowing looks better even at a high rate. The filings say which was chosen; the arithmetic says what it cost.

An at-the-market program sells shares into the market a little at a time.

The company signs an agreement with a bank, files a prospectus supplement naming a dollar ceiling, and the bank sells new shares into the ordinary market on days the company chooses. There is no announcement per sale and no discount. The shares appear in the next quarterly filing's count.

MARA's prospectus supplement filed 2025-03-28 names a ceiling of $2,000,000,000. The ceiling is the fact; the number of shares depends on the price on each day of selling, which nobody knows in advance.

For a shareholder: the cost is entirely ownership, paid gradually. The upside is that nothing has to be repaid, and a company that sells when its price is high gives up less ownership per dollar. The site's profile pages show each program a company has filed and, when the filing states it, how much capacity remains.

A convertible note is a loan that may become shares.

The company borrows from investors and promises to repay on a date years away. In between, the investors may instead take a fixed number of shares per $1,000 lent. They will do so only if the shares are worth more than $1,000, which means only if the stock has risen past the conversion price. The interest rate is low, sometimes zero, because the option to convert is the investor's real payment.

TeraWulf priced $900 million of these on 2025-10-29: a coupon of 0.00 percent, maturity 2032-05-01, 50.1567 shares per $1,000, an initial conversion price of about $19.9375, which was 37.5 percent above that day's $14.50 close. The company expected net proceeds of about $877.6 million.

For a shareholder: there is no interest and no dilution today. If the stock rises past the conversion price, up to 45.1 million shares arrive, sold in effect at a price 37.5 percent above where it stood when the money came in. If the stock does not get there, the company must find $900 million in 2032, from cash, from a new loan, or from selling shares then. The dilution is capped; the repayment risk is the trade.

Equipment financing borrows against the machines themselves.

A lender advances most of the cost of a batch of machines, holds the machines as collateral, and is paid interest and principal from what they earn. If payments stop, the lender takes the machines, not the company. The fixed rate is the fact to find, and the share of the cost the lender funds is the other.

IREN reported, with its fiscal 2026 results on 2026-08-27, a $2.4 billion GPU financing led by Blue Owl at 9.0 percent fixed, funding 90 percent of the associated GPU capital cost. The equipment is graphics processors for AI customers rather than bitcoin machines, but the structure is the same one miners have used for ASICs.

For a shareholder: ownership is untouched and the company controls ten times the equipment its own cash would buy. The cost is $216 million a year of interest that is paid before any profit reaches shares, and a lender who can take the machines if the customers those machines serve stop paying. The larger the loan against a fixed rate, the more the company's result swings with revenue.

Prepaid hosting takes the customer's money before the building is finished.

A hosting or cloud customer agrees a multi-year contract and pays part of it up front, or funds part of the construction directly. The miner spends that money on the site. Later, the customer's monthly bills are reduced until the advance has been worked off. It is a loan from the customer, repaid in service rather than cash.

Two filings show the two forms. IREN's Microsoft contract, announced 2025-11-03, is $9.7 billion over five years for 200 MW with a 20 percent prepayment. Core Scientific's second-quarter 2026 deck states that CoreWeave funds up to $1.5 million per MW of build-out, credited against hosting payments.

For a shareholder: no new shares and no interest, which is why this is the cheapest money on the list. The costs are quieter. Future revenue is smaller by the credit, so the headline contract value overstates what will be collected in cash. And the money is tied to one customer: if that customer walks, the site is built and the buyer of its capacity is gone. The deal tracker lists each contract with its financing line.

A bitcoin-backed loan borrows against coins the miner already holds.

A miner that keeps the bitcoin it mines can pledge it to a lender and borrow dollars against it. The coins stay on the miner's balance sheet, so it keeps any rise in their price. The lender sets a rate and a limit on the loan as a share of the collateral's value. If the price of bitcoin falls far enough, the miner must add coins or repay part of the loan.

CleanSpark opened two of these in one week: $100 million of additional credit capacity from Coinbase Prime, announced 2025-09-23, and a $100 million facility with Two Prime, announced 2025-09-25. Hut 8 refinanced its bitcoin-backed facility in 2026, reducing the rate from 9.0 percent to 7.0 percent and unencumbering approximately 3,300 BTC.

For a shareholder: no dilution and the coins are kept. Every point of interest on $100 million is $1 million a year, which is why Hut 8's two-point cut matters. The risk is the last two rows: a sharp fall in bitcoin can force the company to sell coins at the worst moment, which is exactly the outcome holding them was meant to avoid.

Read a filing with the three costs in mind.

CleanSpark's fiscal 2025 results put the choice in one sentence: the company financed the year with "convertible debt and bitcoin backed revolvers instead of an ATM". In the terms above, it swapped ownership cost for interest cost and repayment risk. Its share count fell 8.9 percent that year, and its interest bill and its debt due in later years rose. Neither is free; they are different.

1. Find the ATM ceiling in the newest 424B5 and the count in the newest 10-Q. Divide the ceiling by today's price for the most shares it can add.
2. Find each convertible note's size and shares per $1,000. Multiply for the shares it can become, and note the year the cash is due if it does not.
3. Find each loan's rate and size. Multiply for the interest a year, and check what the lender holds if payments stop.
4. Find each customer prepayment or credit. Subtract it from the contract value to see what will actually be collected.