Bitcoin mining difficulty drops 10% as rigs go offline

Bitcoin mining difficulty declined 10.09% to 124.93 trillion at block height 953,568, marking the second-largest negative adjustment of 2026 and the lowest difficulty reading since July 2025.

Difficulty measures how much computational work is required to add a block to the Bitcoin ledger. The network retargets difficulty every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks, to keep the average time between blocks near 10 minutes. The prior difficulty period ran about 15.6 days, longer than the target interval, which triggered the downward adjustment.

A roughly 15% drop in bitcoin’s price so far in June reduced miner margins and led some operators to power down machines that were no longer profitable. As rigs went offline, blocks arrived more slowly, contributing to the negative retarget.

The 10.09% cut raises bitcoin output per unit of active hashrate by about 11%, improving returns for machines that remain online. Spot hashprice recovered above $30 per petahash per second per day, reaching $32.31 after falling into the high $20s earlier in June. The seven-day average network hashrate stood near 894 exahashes per second. Early projections pointed to a roughly flat next adjustment of about -0.8% expected around June 27, suggesting the hashrate that went offline had mostly stabilized.

A difficulty-regression model estimated average bitcoin production costs at about $84,300 as of June 13, down from roughly $87,000 earlier in the year as difficulty eased from January highs. With bitcoin trading near $63,780, the spot price is about 25% below that estimated all-in production cost, indicating mining is unprofitable on an average basis across a large portion of the network. Newer, more energy-efficient machines are in a relatively stronger position, while higher-cost operations face continued pressure.

The year has seen several large downward adjustments, including declines of about 11.16% in February and 7.76% in March. The February reduction coincided with winter-storm shutdowns in some regions. The June adjustment coincides with price weakness and a reallocation of some computing capacity toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing workloads; some operators have repurposed or sold hardware for those markets.

Average block times have returned near the 10-minute target since the retarget. Future difficulty changes will depend on bitcoin price movements and whether idled machines are brought back online; a sustained price recovery could prompt restarts, while further price weakness or continued hardware conversions could keep hashrate and difficulty lower for a longer period.