Bitcoin mining difficulty drops 11% in largest negative adjustment since China’s 2021 ban

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty dropped 11.16% on Saturday to 125.86 trillion, according to data from the Bitcoin network explorer Mempool, marking the largest single negative adjustment since China’s sweeping mining ban in July 2021 and the 10th largest negative percentage adjustment of all time, per Bitcoin developer Mononaut.

The difficulty adjustment came at block height 935,424, down from 141.67 trillion. Average block times had drifted to roughly 11.4 minutes ahead of the retarget, well above the protocol’s 10-minute target, preceding a sharp pullback in computing power on the network.

The decline was driven by a roughly 20% drop in the network’s total hashrate over the past month. Bitcoin mining services firm Luxor’s Hashrate Index showed hash rate falling 11% in the past week alone to around 863 EH/s, down from near all-time highs above 1.1 ZH/s reached in October. 

Two forces are behind the hashrate drawdown. Bitcoin’s price has collapsed more than 45% from its October all-time high above $126,000, falling as low as roughly $60,000 on Feb. 5 before rebounding to around $68,800 on Saturday. The sell-off has been fueled by elevated Treasury yields, persistent ETF outflows, and a broad risk-off rotation across equities and commodities. U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs have turned net sellers in 2026, per SoSoValue data. 

Meanwhile, Winter Storm Fern in late January forced miners across U.S. power regions to curtail operations to support strained residential grids. The Block reported that the storm knocked roughly 200 EH/s offline, with Foundry USA’s hashrate alone falling approximately 60%.

Hashprice, the metric tracking expected miner revenue per unit of computing power, hit an all-time spot low of $33.31 per petahash per second per day on Feb. 2 and a daily average all-time low of $34.91/PH/s/day on Feb. 1, Luxor’s Director of Derivatives Ben Harper told Blockspace. The $40/PH/s/day level is widely seen as the threshold at which miners must decide whether to keep machines running.

The Block reported on Feb. 2 that only the newest Antminer S23 series machines are currently seeing healthy returns. Comparatively older models, including Whatsminer M6 series rigs and Antminer S21 units, are nearing unprofitability or already running at a deficit, per Antpool data.

Friday’s adjustment significantly exceeds the previous largest negative difficulty drop since 2021: a roughly 7.5% decline in June 2025 caused by summer heatwave-related hashrate curtailments, which itself had been the biggest drop since the China ban. Bitcoin’s mining difficulty also dropped one year ago in early Feb. 2025. 

The broader profitability picture is grim. The average cost to mine one bitcoin is around $87,000, according to Checkonchain data, while spot trades near $69,000, roughly 20% below production cost. The Block’s 2026 Mining Outlook noted that transaction fees as a share of miner revenue collapsed from about 7% to roughly 1% after the 2024 onchain activity boom faded, making miners increasingly reliant on BTC price appreciation.

Some analysts see a potential contrarian signal in the data. VanEck said in December that bitcoin has historically posted positive 90-day forward returns 65% of the time when hashrate was shrinking. Bernstein analysts said this week the current weakness may represent a late-stage correction, projecting bitcoin could bottom in the $60,000 range before reversing later this year.

The difficulty drop provides some mechanical relief for surviving miners, as each unit of hashpower now has slightly better odds of earning a block reward. But whether that translates into real breathing room depends on where bitcoin’s price goes from here.

Bitcoin is trading at approximately $68,800 as of Saturday, according to The Block’s Bitcoin Price page.

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