Fundstrat co-founder Tom Lee published a ranking of 17 large-cap crypto-linked equities with market capitalizations above $2 billion, measuring their 90-day rolling correlation with Bitcoin and Ethereum against the performance of BlackRock’s exchange-traded funds. The findings reveal a growing split between corporate Bitcoin treasuries and mining companies that are shifting toward artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Strategy registered the highest Bitcoin correlation at 78%, making it the clearest large-cap equity proxy for the cryptocurrency. On the Ethereum side, BitMine Immersion Technologies led with an 80% correlation, followed by Coinbase at 74%.
Mining companies showed much weaker links to Bitcoin. Core Scientific recorded just 16%, Cipher Mining 17%, TeraWulf 18%, and Hut 8 19%. Riot Platforms posted 31%, while IREN reached 33%.
The divergence is increasingly visible in financial statements. Core Scientific reported $164.2 million in second-quarter revenue, of which $136.7 million came from AI colocation and high-performance computing services, compared with only $21.5 million from self-mining. TeraWulf generated $21 million from HPC leasing and $13 million from digital asset mining in its May reporting period. IREN’s March quarter showed $111.2 million from Bitcoin mining and $33.6 million from AI cloud services, putting AI at roughly 23% of total sales.
The structural takeaway from the ranking is that lower AI revenue share tends to mean higher Bitcoin correlation. However, the pivot has been costly: MARA and CleanSpark accumulated combined losses of $851 million during their infrastructure adaptation processes. Meanwhile, a high correlation did not guarantee positive equity returns. Strategy traded near $118.86 at the close of the session, far below its 52-week high of $365.21.
For investors, mining stocks increasingly look like an infrastructure trade built around megawatts, GPUs and long-duration computing contracts, while Strategy remains the more direct corporate Bitcoin exposure.
