Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Plunges 10%, Delivering Rare Relief to Struggling Miners

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty fell 10.09% over the weekend, dropping to its lowest level since July 2025 and handing the network’s squeezed miners a rare measure of relief as falling prices forced weaker operators offline.

The adjustment, recorded at block height 953,568, cut difficulty from 138.96 trillion to 124.93 trillion, the second-largest negative adjustment of 2026 after February, and one of the steepest declines in Bitcoin’s history. 

Difficulty automatically recalibrates roughly every two weeks to keep block times near ten minutes, falling when miners disconnect and rising when they pile back in.

Related: Bitcoin’s Four-Year Cycle Is Still on Track, Says Bob Loukas Despite Market Dip

Miners Catch a Break

Because difficulty and reward-per-hashrate move inversely, the cut boosts the value each unit of computing power earns by roughly 11%. That relief showed up in hashprice, the estimated daily revenue from one petahash per second of power, which recovered to about US$32.51 (AU$46) after sliding below US$28 (AU$40) the previous week, dragging many operations under breakeven.

Bitcoin (BTC) fell about 15% in June to trade around US$64,000 (AU$90,880), while the network’s average mining cost was estimated near US$84,300 (AU$119,706), leaving many miners running at a loss. 

When revenue falls below the cost of electricity and hardware, operators have little choice but to switch off rigs until conditions improve, a culling that mechanically lowers difficulty for everyone left running.

As unprofitable rigs switched off, Bitcoin’s hashrate slid from more than 1,000 exahashes per second in late spring to about 893 exahashes per second, a sharp retreat in the computing power securing the network. 

The thinner hashrate stretched block times beyond eleven minutes before the adjustment pulled them back toward the ten-minute target.

Read more: Solana Institute Pushes Senate to Preserve Developer Protections in CLARITY Crypto Bill 

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