US Bitcoin mining executives are incomes properly above their friends within the IT and vitality sectors as a result of beneficiant inventory compensation packages, and shareholders are preventing again, in accordance with new findings from asset supervisor VanEck.
Regardless of “aggressive compensation packages,” Bitcoin mining agency shareholders are “balking,” VanEck head of digital property analysis Matthew Sigel and funding analyst Nathan Frankovitz reported on Thursday.
The researchers discovered that common shareholder approval for government pay packages is simply 64% in comparison with round 90% for S&P 500 and Russell 3000 firms.
“That skepticism seems well-founded. Mining executives proceed to grant themselves outsized fairness awards that dilute shareholders with out reliably linking pay to long-term worth creation,” they added.
The researchers reviewed government compensation throughout eight US-listed Bitcoin miners: Bit Digital, Cipher Mining, CleanSpark, Core Scientific, Hut 8, MARA Holdings, Riot Platforms and TeraWulf.
The researchers additionally discovered that whereas Bitcoin miner executives earned a median of $6.6 million in 2023, this has almost doubled to $14.4 million in 2024, which far exceeds comparable sectors resembling vitality and tech.
Fairness-based compensation
The compensation is predominantly equity-based, with fairness awards comprising 79% of complete pay in 2023 and 89% in 2024, the report revealed.
Riot Platforms CEO Fred Thiel acquired the biggest fairness award at $79.3 millison in 2024. This was almost double that of MARA Holdings and Core Scientific and a number of occasions greater than the opposite miner CEOs’ fairness grants.
“Miner government pay practices stay aggressive, equity-heavy, and sometimes weakly aligned with shareholder outcomes.”
Stark disparities in government pay
The report additionally highlighted stark disparities in pay-for-performance alignment. Whereas firms like TeraWulf and Core Scientific paid executives simply 2% of their market cap progress, Riot Platforms paid 73% of its market cap enhance to named government officers, totaling $230 million in 2024.
Associated: Bitcoin miner production falls in June on power curtailment, weather
The researchers famous that these disparities echo issues first raised in 2022, when Riot’s shareholders rejected the agency’s say-on-pay proposal after disclosing nearly $22 million in CEO compensation.
In 2025, three of the eight miners confronted “putting rebukes” on their government pay proposals, the researchers reported.
Cointelegraph contacted Riot Platforms for remark however didn’t obtain a direct response.
Efficiency inventory models and vesting
On the constructive aspect, six of the eight miners have adopted efficiency inventory models (PSUs) with multi-year vesting tied to share value targets or relative complete shareholder return, and most firms now assist annual say-on-pay votes for elevated accountability.
PSUs are a sort of fairness compensation the place executives obtain firm inventory, however provided that sure efficiency circumstances are met.
VanEck urged that miners deal with tying bonuses to value per coin mined, incorporating capital effectivity measures like return on invested capital, and strengthening efficiency necessities for fairness awards with multi-year vesting.
“As Bitcoin miners mature into large-scale infrastructure operators, their government compensation applications should evolve as properly,” they concluded.
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