Original title: (The world's first blockchain stock receives another delisting warning, is 'selling shovels' no longer appealing?)
Original author: Eric, Foresight News
On January 16, 2026, Canaan Inc. announced that it received a notification from the NASDAQ trading platform on January 14. The notification indicated that Canaan Inc. was warned because its stock price had closed below $1 for the past 30 trading days. According to NASDAQ listing rules, if Canaan Inc. cannot bring its stock price back to $1 or above within 180 days (by July 13, 2026), it may face delisting.
Canaan Creative stated that if necessary, the company will implement a reverse stock split to meet the stock price requirements. A reverse stock split refers to the operation of reducing the total number of shares by merging existing circulating shares, thereby raising the price per share. The author reached out to Canaan Creative regarding the warning, but as of the time of publication, there has been no response.
This is the second time Canaan Creative has received a delisting warning in the past year; the last time was in May 2025. Afterward, due to the rise in Bitcoin prices, the stock price rose above $1, alleviating the crisis. However, in recent months, the overall sluggishness of the cryptocurrency market has caused Canaan Creative's stock price to fall nearly 30% in the past 30 trading days.
On December 13, 2025, Bitcoin treasury company Kindly MD received a warning for the same reason, while BNB treasury company Windtree Therapeutics was delisted in August 2025. Unlike cryptocurrency treasury companies, as one of the leading players in the Bitcoin mining machine manufacturing sector, Canaan Creative's current situation is somewhat lamentable.
Canaan Creative was listed on NASDAQ in November 2019, becoming the world's first pure blockchain concept company to complete an IPO. After going public, Canaan Creative's stock price remained in a state of breaking below par for over a year, but with the arrival of the cryptocurrency bull market, its stock price began to steadily recover from the end of 2020 and reached a historic high of nearly $40 in March 2021, with a market capitalization exceeding $5 billion.
Good times did not last long. With the issuance of domestic mining bans and the bear market that persisted throughout 2022, Canaan Creative's stock price continued to decline and returned to pre-bull market levels. In this cycle, although Bitcoin's price reached new highs and even nearly doubled its highest price in 2021, the stock price did not rise but instead fell, first breaking below $1 in April 2024.
The poor performance in the capital market, apart from objective market reasons, is also a fuse related to the industry and Canaan Creative itself.
In the Bitcoin mining machine market, Bitmain is the absolute leader. Before 2021, Canaan Creative firmly held the second position, but after 2021, MicroBT quickly rose due to a higher power consumption ratio, pushing Canaan down to third place. According to a report released by Intel Market Research in December 2025, MicroBT's market share is between 15% and 20%, while Canaan's is between 10% and 15%.
Canaan Creative's annual reports from 2021 to 2024 show that its net profit has continued to decline over the four years, from a net profit of over $300 million in 2021 to a loss of nearly $250 million in 2024. The reasons are twofold: on one hand, the bear market in 2022 led to a backlog of inventory at Canaan, continuously impacting profits; on the other hand, fierce competition has kept R&D expenses and operating costs high, while market share has not seen effective improvement.
Under multiple blows, the sharp decline in demand has become the last straw that broke the camel's back. According to MSX researcher Frank's analysis, the overdrawn expectations of Bitcoin mining narratives and visibly intensifying competition have led many Bitcoin mining companies to transform into AI computing infrastructure. Although 'selling shovels' has always been a good business model, in the current capital market, the story of Bitcoin is clearly not as certain as that of AI, and funds have naturally voted with their feet, turning towards AI-related enterprises.
In fact, Canaan Creative began developing AI chips nearly 10 years ago, launching its first commercial edge AI chip, Kendryte K210, based on the RISC-V architecture in 2018. This chip is mainly used for edge computing, supporting AI visual and audio processing. Over the past six years, Canaan has released three chips, each with significant innovations based on the previous generation.
Although the chips launched by Canaan Creative have technical highlights and were 'early birds', compared to giants like NVIDIA and Intel, Canaan lacks ecosystem support and large-scale demand. In 2024, its AI-related business revenue was only about $900,000, while operating expenses accounted for 15% of the entire company. In June 2025, Canaan Creative announced the cessation of non-core AI semiconductor business and the closure of its AI chip department, stating in a related announcement that the company had been exploring the sale of its AI business since March 2022 but had not found a buyer, ultimately deciding to abandon it to focus on cryptocurrency mining machines and the North American market.
Canaan Creative is a microcosm of the 'physical business' in the Web3 industry. Another listed company in the Bitcoin mining machine manufacturing sector, Ebang International, has seen its stock price drop from nearly $450 at its peak in 2020 to around $3, a decline of over 99%. For hardware manufacturers, there is a very mature and fixed valuation model; if the industry they are in does not have obvious growth prospects, it can easily fall into a vicious cycle.
On the positive side, at the end of 2025, Canaan Creative signed a large order of 4.5 MV in October, followed by completing $72 million in financing in November. Clearly, there are still people in the market who believe that the once 'Pumpkin Zhang' can find a way out of the predicament, but to escape the dilemma, Canaan Creative may need a new story.
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