Wallets tied to MARA Holdings, one of the largest public bitcoin miners, have moved 1,000 BTC worth about $82.8 million to crypto exchanges in five days, while MARA’s shares have nearly halved in a month.

Onchain trackers flagged the transfers early Monday, writing that MARA “appears to be selling” after wallets linked to the miner deposited 1,000 BTC into Binance and Gate over five days.

A wallet labeled “MARA: Miner” on Arkham sent 500 BTC to a relay address, which then passed the full 500 BTC to a second hub wallet within minutes. From there, the coins were split into exchange deposits:

Of the 1,000 BTC, about 550 BTC went to Binance, 350 BTC to Gate and 100 BTC to Coinbase.

The bigger story is in the relay wallet’s history and according to mempool.space records , the address has received and forwarded about 5,297 BTC across 69 transactions since mid-April, almost always in round lots of 50 to 500 BTC.

The batch size has in fact grown; i.e., through the summer, transfers were mostly 100 BTC; however, since Sept. 22, every transfer has been 500 BTC, four times in four weeks. That totals 2,000 BTC in under a month, worth roughly $165 million at the current bitcoin price.

Not every MARA outflow uses this path either, as analysts also flagged 996 BTC moving from a MARA-labeled wallet to Galaxy Digital on Oct. 9.

MARA is no longer a pure bitcoin hoarder, with Bitcoin.com News reporting in August that the company sold 23,093 bitcoin during the first half of 2026 at an average price of $70,631. This lay in sharp contrast to its earlier strategy of holding everything it mined.

Its second-quarter 10-Q shows where the money went as MARA booked $1.63 billion in proceeds from digital asset sales over six months and repaid about $913 million of convertible notes. It ended June with 35,577 BTC, including bitcoin receivable, of which 4,528 BTC was pledged as collateral.

The filing also describes a plan to “reallocate resources toward AI initiatives” and high-performance computing (HPC). Chief Executive Fred Thiel said in September he felt “very confident” about signing two AI data center leases by year-end.

Mining itself too has gotten harder and Bitcoin.com News reported recently that network difficulty had jumped 5.92% on Oct. 16, its third-largest increase of 2026, which means each machine earns fewer coins for the same power bill.

MARA shares closed at $7.53 on Friday , down from $13.63 on Sept. 22. That is a 44.8% drop in less than four weeks, including a 9.6% slide on Oct. 16 alone. Bitcoin has held up far better and the asset is currently trading near $82,300, up about 1% since yesterday.

From the outside looking in, investors are pricing MARA less as a bitcoin proxy and more as an unfinished AI infrastructure bet.

Strive just leapfrogged MARA in the corporate bitcoin rankings, snapping up another 2,822 BTC for $235 million, barely a day…