Bitcoin difficulty falls 10% as miners curtail after June selloff

Bitcoin mining difficulty dropped 10.09% to 124.9 trillion at block 953,568 on the network’s latest retarget, marking the second-largest fall of 2026 and the 11th-largest decline on record.

Difficulty eased from 138.9 trillion to 124.9 trillion after miners reduced hashing activity. The adjustment followed an epoch that lasted 15.6 days instead of the 14-day target because overall hashrate fell.

A roughly 15% decline in bitcoin’s price during June reduced miner margins and coincided with hashrate moving offline. The price dipped below $60,000 before recovering to above $64,000. Daily mining revenue, measured as hashprice, fell below $30 per petahash per second.

A research note said the June price drop squeezed margins and warned that a hashprice under $30 per PH/s can push many operations close to or below gross breakeven once overhead, debt service and expansion costs are included. It added that the most efficient fleets can remain profitable at lower hashprice levels while older machines and higher-cost sites are more likely to be switched off.

Operational shifts also removed hashing capacity. Some public miners have been converting sites to host artificial intelligence and high-performance computing workloads, using power capacity without contributing bitcoin hashrate. The start of the four-coincident-peak season in Texas in June created incentives for large electricity users to curtail load during peak windows, temporarily reducing mining activity in a major North American region.

Network data indicate hashrate began to rebound after the early June reduction, suggesting some curtailments were temporary. For the next two-week epoch, the lower difficulty reduces the computational work required per block, increasing the bitcoin earned per unit of hashrate for miners that remain online.

Bitcoin’s protocol retargets difficulty every 2,016 blocks to keep average block production near 10 minutes. This adjustment was the third notable downward correction in 2026, following declines of 11.16% in February and 7.76% in March.