Miners Catch a Break: Bitcoin Difficulty Takes a 10% Dive ⛏️

Bitcoin's mining difficulty fell 10.09% on Sunday at block 953,568, easing some of the strain on operators grappling with compressed margins. According to Galaxy Research, the adjustment brought difficulty down from 138.96 trillion to 124.93 trillion, the second-largest drop of 2026 and a 20% decline from the network's November peak. The epoch between adjustments stretched to 15.6 days, longer than the typical 14, as hashrate came offline across the network.

The shift comes as Bitcoin ($BTC) has shed roughly 15% in June, a move Galaxy said has "squeezed miner margins." Total hashrate now sits at 886 exahashes per second (EH/s), down 12% for the month and 23% from its October high, per Blockchain.com. With fewer machines competing for each block, the remaining miners are earning approximately 9% more per unit of compute, according to crypto trader Merlijn Enkelaar.

Hashprice, which measures expected miner revenue per unit of hashrate, has climbed 13% alongside the difficulty drop to $33 per petahash per second per day, according to Hashrate Index. The Energy Mag reported Saturday that the $30 threshold is significant because it pushes more operators toward gross breakeven, with older-generation machines carrying higher electricity costs most likely to be powered down.

Sunday's decline ranks as Bitcoin's 11th-largest downward difficulty adjustment on record. The largest-ever drop occurred in July 2021 following China's mining ban and the subsequent exodus of operators, while difficulty also fell more than 11% in February amid storm-related curtailments and a 25% $BTC price decline. The next adjustment is scheduled for June 27, with Coinwarz projecting a 1.69% increase to roughly 127 trillion.