Trump-backed American Bitcoin loses $57M, grows BTC holdings

American Bitcoin posted another losing quarter, yet the company kept stacking coins regardless. The Trump-family-linked miner recorded a net loss of $57.2 million for the three months ending in June, an improvement over the $81.8 million shortfall from the prior quarter.

Revenue from mining operations ticked up 8% to $67 million, and the firm churned out a company-record 932 bitcoin during the period. The red ink thinned, but it did not disappear. The first half of 2026 now sits more than $139 million underwater.

The playbook here is straightforward: mine, hold, and do not sell. American Bitcoin closed June with 8,002 bitcoin on its balance sheet, a 14% increase quarter over quarter. An additional 3,090 coins sit pledged under equipment agreements with rig manufacturer Bitmain, whose specialized machines are a far cry from the hobbyist hardware that once powered the early network.

The company itself is new, but its roots run deeper. Created in March 2025 by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., American Bitcoin reached the Nasdaq under the ticker ABTC through an all-stock merger with Gryphon Digital Mining last September.

The corporate structure is central to the strategy. American Bitcoin operates as a majority-owned subsidiary of Hut 8, the North American miner. Rather than pour capital into building its own data centers, it runs on Hut 8’s existing infrastructure, a setup designed to keep costs lower than a mining startup would face from day one.

This mine-and-hold approach places American Bitcoin in a growing class of companies that treat bitcoin less as inventory to liquidate and more as a reserve to accumulate. The firm now ranks roughly 16th among corporate bitcoin holders worldwide.

The venture is just one piece of the family’s expanding crypto portfolio. Donald Trump reported about $1.4 billion in crypto income on a recent financial disclosure, with digital assets overtaking real estate as the largest reported earnings source.

Going public was itself a workaround. Instead of a traditional IPO, American Bitcoin reversed into Gryphon Digital Mining, a smaller listed miner. That route reached the exchange quickly, but it carried the baggage of a struggling shell company.

Losses of this scale are hardly unusual in the sector. Bitcoin mining is a capital-intensive business, dominated by heavy upfront spending on machinery and electricity. The economics swing violently with the bitcoin price and with the periodic halving events that cut the block reward miners receive.

The broader industry has spent 2026 under pressure. The 2024 halving reduced block rewards, energy prices have stayed elevated, and miners have leaned on bitcoin treasuries and pivots into AI data centers to offer investors a growth narrative worth backing.

Keeping the hardware current is a constant drain. A mining fleet is a depreciating asset in a field where every new generation of rig arrives faster and more efficient. The spending rarely pauses for long.

The market has not rewarded the effort. American Bitcoin executed a 1-for-15 reverse stock split last month to stay compliant with Nasdaq listing rules, and shares closed the week down more than 6%.

The old promise that mining could be a business open to anyone has always clashed with the reality: it is capital-hungry, energy-intensive, and brutal when prices slide.

That reality forces the sustainability question. Two straight quarters of heavy losses invite scrutiny, even for a company that can lean on a larger parent’s cost base to cushion the blow.

Everything ultimately hinges on the bitcoin price. A treasury of 8,000 coins is a massive unrealized gain in a rising market and a heavy anchor in a falling one. The balance sheet is as much a wager on bitcoin as it is on the mining operation underneath.

For now, American Bitcoin is doing precisely what it promised: turning revenue and fresh capital into more bitcoin while booking losses along the way. Whether that reads as conviction or exposure depends almost entirely on where the price heads next.