Supply · Oct 17, 2026

Can XBT miners dump? They’ve already moved 72% of what they can

By xbt.live · 4 minute read

With the coinbase lock ending around Nov 1, everyone is asking whether miners are about to dump. So we checked the chain. Miners can sell less than people think right now, they've already moved most of what they could, and all of it together is a sliver next to the 20 million XBT inherited from bitcoin.

Bar chart: 20.07 million XBT inherited from bitcoin versus about 50,400 mined since the fork, split into about 26,700 pre-lock rewards already moved, 10,200 not moved, and 13,500 locked until block 979,920

Three buckets of mined XBT

Mined in	Blocks	XBT	Can it move?
Fork to block 973,439 (Aug 8 to Sept 21)	11,808	~36,900	Yes. About 72% already has
Lock window, block 973,440 on (Sept 21 on)	4,300 so far	~13,500 now, ~20,250 at release	No, not until block 979,920
Inherited from bitcoin at the fork	n/a	~20.07 million	Yes, since Aug 8

So right now, the miner XBT that could still be sold is the roughly 10,200 XBT of pre-lock rewards that hasn't moved. Around Nov 1, about 20,250 XBT more becomes spendable at once.

How much have miners already moved?

We checked every 20th block from the fork to block 973,439, 591 of the 11,808 mining rewards, and looked up whether each payout has been spent.

About 72% of pre-lock reward XBT has moved, roughly 26,700 XBT. With this sample size, the true figure is likely between 69% and 76%.
About 28% hasn't moved, roughly 10,200 XBT.
Most of it moved early. Spends were rare before Sept 6 and took off after it. Half of all the moves we found happened by Sept 13, and 90% by Sept 21. Only a trickle has moved since, picking up a little this week.

The Sept 6 start isn't a coincidence. Knots nodes only relay spends of mining rewards at least 6,480 blocks old, and the first rewards after the fork reached that age around Sept 6. Before then, a reward could only be spent by a miner putting the spend in a block itself.

Moved isn't the same as sold

A spend shows coins left the address that mined them, not that they hit an exchange. Much of it is pools paying their miners, who may still hold. Some is just wallets tidying up. Two patterns stood out:

Pool blocks moved the most. Most of the big pools' sampled rewards have been spent, which is what payouts look like.
Solo miners mostly held. Blocks tagged "Knots", typically miners running their own node, have barely moved: about 6% of their sampled XBT.

The early moves also lined up with XBT's wildest weeks. Trading opened Sept 1, price hit a $1,095 close on Sept 5 and fell to $154 by Sept 12. The chain can't tell us how much of that was miners selling, only that a lot of mined XBT moved in the same window.

The bigger supply is the old supply

About 20.07 million XBT were inherited from bitcoin at the fork, and every one of them has been spendable since Aug 8. Everything mined since is about 50,400 XBT, 0.25% of supply. The lock cliff matters because 20,250 XBT unlocks in one block on a thin market, not because it's big next to the coins that were never locked.

What if Knots PR #429 ships?

It would cover the current batch too. The PR locks every reward from block 973,440 onward until Sept 1, 2027, so the roughly 20,250 XBT mined in today's window would stay locked, along with everything mined after it. But it only works if it's running on most of the network before block 979,920. If it isn't, that batch unlocks at 979,920 no matter what. How PR #429's two locks work

What to watch

After block 979,920, our Lock Pressure chart tracks how many of the unlocked rewards actually move, block by block. That's the real answer to "will miners dump", and nobody has it yet.

Lock Pressure chart Unlock countdown

Method: every 20th block from 961,639 to 973,439 (591 blocks), checking each coinbase output's spend status on mempool.guide, Oct 17, 2026 at block 977,766. Figures are estimates from that sample and are rounded. "Moved" means spent on chain, not sold. Not financial advice.

Have an XBT story? Write for xbt.live.

Life support

So the patient was moved to the emergency room. In August, the SHA-256 miners left on their own chain, and the nodes enforcing BIP-110's rules kept going without them. At the end of the month, the rule-keeping chain switched its mining to BLAKE2b so the captured SHA-256 hash couldn't take it over. That chain is XBT. The full story is in How Bitcoin kept its rules and moved to BLAKE2b.

Patients on life support don't look healthy, and XBT doesn't either. About 102 XBT buy one BTC. It has had three bear markets in six weeks. That's what a rescue looks like from the outside. The people in the ER right now, the node runners, the miners, the builders shipping wallets and pools every week, are doing the work while the outcome is anything but certain. If the patient makes it, they're the ones who saved it.

The strangest part: you already own it

If you held bitcoin before Aug 8, 2026, you hold XBT. Same coins, same addresses, same keys. The proof of work that secured your coins for 17 years secures them on both chains, because the history is identical up to block 961,631. Every UTXO that existed before the split exists on XBT. The XBT you hold cost you exactly what your BTC cost you.

Since the split, the two histories have gone different ways. XBT's blocks follow BIP-110's rules: less data that isn't money, a cleaner chain going forward. Not sure what you hold? Check an address.

Two places at once

The body is still on the old chain: the brand, the network effect, the exchange listings, the ticker everyone knows. That doesn't disappear overnight, and we won't pretend it does.

But the thing that made Bitcoin worth caring about was never the brand. It was the idea: money that no state, no company and no small group of operators can change on users without their consent. That idea now lives on the chain whose users enforced their rules when it mattered. The body stayed. The soul moved.

Bitcoin was always a quiet way to separate money from the state. It still is. It just lives somewhere new.

Opinion. Not financial advice. XBT trades on thin markets and can lose most of its value quickly. Price figures as of the evening of Oct 10, 2026 (US Eastern).