Tom Lee ranked 17 large-cap crypto stocks by how closely they track Bitcoin and Ethereum. The oddest result sits at the bottom. Bitcoin miners barely move with BTC price at all.

Core Scientific tracked the asset at 16%. MicroStrategy tracked it at 78%. Yet MicroStrategy mines no Bitcoin, it only holds a pile of it.

What Tom Lee’s Crypto Stock Rankings Show

The Fundstrat co-founder measured 90-day correlations against BlackRock’s two crypto funds. He covered every crypto-linked stock worth more than $2 billion. Fundstrat and Factset supplied the numbers.

Correlation simply asks whether two prices move together. A score near 100% means they move in step. A score near zero means they ignore each other.

BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) led on Ethereum (ETH) at 80%. Coinbase (COIN) came second at 74%.

Strategy (MSTR) led on Bitcoin (BTC) at 78%. Lee also expects ether to outrun bitcoin this cycle. He chairs BitMine, the stock at the top of his own Ethereum column.

Why Bitcoin Miners Stopped Tracking Bitcoin

Now look at the miners. Core Scientific (CORZ) scored 16%. Cipher Mining (CIFR) hit 17%, TeraWulf (WULF) 18%, and Hut 8 (HUT) 19%.

Riot Platforms (RIOT) reached 31% and IREN 33%. Every one of them trailed Trump Media (DJT), which scored 40% and mines nothing.

The answer sits in their accounts. These firms now sell computing power to artificial intelligence companies, and that business has taken over.

The reason is practical. Mining margins thinned as costs rose, while miners already owned the two things AI firms compete for hardest.

They hold cheap power contracts and warehouses wired to carry it. Renting that out to AI companies pays better, and it pays every month rather than with each block.

Core Scientific booked $164.2 million in revenue for the quarter ending in June. Colocation, its data centre business, brought in $136.7 million. Self-mining brought in $21.5 million.

So AI work supplied 83% of the money. Bitcoin supplied 13%.

TeraWulf showed the same shape in May. It earned $21.0 million leasing high performance computing capacity against $13.0 million from mining, or 62% from AI.

IREN sits further behind. Its quarter ending in March brought $33.6 million from AI cloud services. Mining still brought $111.2 million, leaving AI at 23%.

Line those three up against Lee’s table and a pattern appears. The more a miner earns from AI, the less its shares follow bitcoin.

Core Scientific is the most AI-driven and the least correlated. IREN is the least AI-driven and the most correlated. TeraWulf sits between them on both measures.

“We expect the business to be increasingly driven by recurring, contracted revenue, reducing exposure to the volatility historically associated with bitcoin mining,” Patrick Fleury, TeraWulf chief financial officer, in the company’s quarterly results.

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History makes the switch sharper. Core Scientific filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2022, after a Bitcoin crash and heavy debts. It emerged in January 2024.

The miner that Bitcoin nearly destroyed is now the miner least exposed to it.

What This Changes for Crypto Equity Exposure

The practical read is blunt. Anyone who bought a miner for Bitcoin exposure now owns a power and computing landlord. Its fortunes rest on demand from AI firms.

That works both ways. Miners have climbed while Bitcoin fell, which is exactly what a weak correlation predicts. The pivot is sector wide, and it has been costly. MARA and CleanSpark posted $851 million in combined losses while chasing it.

Treasury companies track Bitcoin more tightly. They have not paid better. MicroStrategy traded near $118.86 on Friday against a 52-week high of $365.21.

Correlation describes direction, not profit. A stock can shadow Bitcoin faithfully on the way down.

One caution covers the whole table. These are 90-day trailing figures. They tighten and loosen with each market phase rather than holding forever.

Bitcoin traded near $77,151 at the time of writing, up 6.3% on the day. Ether changed hands around $2,412 after a 3.5% gain.

The next earnings season will test how far the split runs. Miners that book more AI revenue should drift further from Bitcoin, not closer.

Lee built his table to help equity investors buy crypto exposure. Read closely, it shows how much of that exposure the mining sector has already sold off.

Source: BeInCrypto