New York, January 5, 2026, 12:20 EST — Regular session
Shares of Riot Platforms, Inc were up 2.4% at $14.50 by midday on Monday, tracking a roughly 2.5% rise in bitcoin to about $93,612. Trading volume topped 6.4 million shares.
Riot is one of several U.S.-listed bitcoin miners whose shares often move more than the token itself, making the stock a higher-volatility proxy for crypto sentiment. That leverage works both ways when prices reverse.
The bigger question for miners in early 2026 is whether they can reduce dependence on bitcoin’s cycle by building out large data centers for power-hungry computing workloads. Those projects can reshape cash needs, profitability timing and how investors value the business.
Riot last week named Jason Chung as chief financial officer, effective March 1, with Colin Yee set to move into a senior advisor role. “I am pleased to appoint Jason Chung as Riot’s next CFO,” CEO Jason Les said in a statement. Riot Platforms
A separate company filing showed Riot raised base pay for top executives and removed a bitcoin component from the compensation of Les and executive chairman Benjamin Yi, who previously received 10 bitcoin alongside salary. The filing also revised Riot’s 2026 annual incentive plan to drop a “Bitcoin Yield” metric and add data-center revenue and data-center NOI (net operating income, a property cash-earnings measure) once a tenant is secured; it also reweighted adjusted EBITDA, a common earnings-before-interest-and-taxes proxy. SEC
Investors are also digesting Riot’s new at-the-market offering program — a setup that lets a company sell shares into the open market from time to time through brokers — for up to $500 million. Riot said it terminated its prior sales agreement after selling about $600.5 million of stock under that program, with about $149.5 million remaining unsold. SEC
Crypto-linked equities broadly gained, with Marathon Digital up about 4.5%, CleanSpark up 5.1% and Coinbase higher by 7.4%. Hut 8 added nearly 12% in choppy trading.
Riot surged about 11.8% on Friday to close at $14.16, reversing a late-2025 slide and putting the stock closer to the upper end of its recent range. RIOT’s 52-week range has been roughly $6.19 to $23.93, leaving the shares well below last year’s peak. Nasdaq
But the trade still carries familiar risks: miners’ margins can compress quickly if bitcoin retreats, network competition intensifies or power costs rise. Riot’s data-center strategy also hinges on securing tenants and financing build-outs on terms investors view as accretive.
