Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Set for Steep Drop as Hashrate Slides After Price Crash

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty is on track for the second-largest downward adjustment this year, offering a reprieve to miners after a sharp pullback in network hashrate followed bitcoin’s early June price crash. This article first appeared in The Energy Mag. The original article can be viewed here.

The Energy Mag (formerly The Miner Mag) provides news, data, and insights on the energy–compute–markets nexus. The network’s next difficulty adjustment is currently estimated to fall by about 9.55% in roughly eight hours, according to mining network data.

The decline would reset the amount of computational work required to mine a block lower for the next two-week epoch, lifting the amount of bitcoin that active miners can earn for each unit of hashrate they operate. The expected adjustment follows a sustained drop in bitcoin’s hashrate over the past two weeks. The network’s seven-day moving average hashrate hovered around the 1 zettahash-per-second (ZH/s) mark at the end of May, before falling to roughly 861 EH/s around June 10.

It has since recovered moderately to about 894 EH/s in recent days. The decline came after bitcoin briefly plunged to as low as $60,000 in early June, before rebounding to around $64,000. The selloff pushed hashprice — a measure of daily mining revenue per unit of hashrate — below $30 per petahash per second, renewing pressure on operators with higher power costs or less efficient fleets.

That threshold is important for miners because it pushes more sites closer to, or below, gross breakeven before corporate overhead, debt service and expansion spending. While the most efficient fleets can continue to generate positive margins at lower hashprice levels, older-generation machines and operators with higher electricity costs are more likely to be switched off when revenue falls. The coming difficulty adjustment would partly offset that pressure.

All else being equal, a 9.55% drop in difficulty increases the amount of bitcoin earned per unit of active hashrate by more than 9%, which could lift hashprice back above $30/PH/s if bitcoin’s price and transaction-fee levels remain broadly stable. While part of the hashrate drop appears to be economics-driven, another factor is the continued redeployment of power capacity away from bitcoin mining toward high-performance computing and AI data center workloads.

Several public miners have been unplugging mining rigs or slowing mining growth as they retrofit sites for contracted AI/HPC use, a strategy that can remove bitcoin hashrate even when the underlying power capacity remains in use. Texas may also be contributing to the recent hashrate volatility. The state’s 4CP season began in June, when large power users in ERCOT try to avoid running during the four summer coincident-peak intervals that determine transmission cost allocation for the following year.

For bitcoin miners, the 4CP mechanism creates a strong incentive to curtail during potential monthly peak windows, even when real-time power prices are not especially high. That can temporarily remove significant mining load from the network, particularly because Texas remains one of the largest mining markets in North America. The recent rebound in network hashrate suggests some of the early June reduction may have been a temporary curtailment rather than a permanent shutdown.

This article first appeared in The Energy Mag. The original article can be viewed here. The Energy Mag (formerly The Miner Mag) provides news, data, and insights on the energy–compute–markets nexus.

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