US Bitcoin mining executives are incomes effectively above their friends within the IT and power sectors as a consequence of beneficiant inventory compensation packages, and shareholders are preventing again, in keeping with new findings from asset supervisor VanEck.
Regardless of “aggressive compensation packages,” Bitcoin mining agency shareholders are “balking,” VanEck head of digital belongings analysis Matthew Sigel and funding analyst Nathan Frankovitz reported on Thursday.
The researchers discovered that common shareholder approval for govt pay packages is simply 64% in comparison with round 90% for S&P 500 and Russell 3000 corporations.
“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 govt 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 mean of $6.6 million in 2023, this has almost doubled to $14.4 million in 2024, which far exceeds comparable sectors comparable to power and tech.
Fairness-based compensation
The compensation is predominantly equity-based, with fairness awards comprising 79% of whole pay in 2023 and 89% in 2024, the report revealed.
Riot Platforms CEO Fred Thiel obtained 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 instances greater than the opposite miner CEOs’ fairness grants.
“Miner govt pay practices stay aggressive, equity-heavy, and sometimes weakly aligned with shareholder outcomes.”
Stark disparities in govt pay
The report additionally highlighted stark disparities in pay-for-performance alignment. Whereas corporations like TeraWulf and Core Scientific paid executives simply 2% of their market cap development, Riot Platforms paid 73% of its market cap improve to named govt officers, totaling $230 million in 2024.
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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 virtually $22 million in CEO compensation.
In 2025, three of the eight miners confronted “putting rebukes” on their govt pay proposals, the researchers reported.
Cointelegraph contacted Riot Platforms for remark however didn’t obtain a right away response.
Efficiency inventory items and vesting
On the optimistic facet, six of the eight miners have adopted efficiency inventory items (PSUs) with multi-year vesting tied to share value targets or relative whole shareholder return, and most corporations now assist annual say-on-pay votes for elevated accountability.
PSUs are a kind of fairness compensation the place executives obtain firm inventory, however provided that sure efficiency situations are met.
VanEck instructed that miners concentrate on 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 govt compensation applications should evolve as effectively,” they concluded.
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