Bitcoin Difficulty Drops 0.74% as Miners Shift to AI
Bitcoin’s mining difficulty fell 0.74% at block 959,616, the network’s 15th adjustment of 2026, as miners cut hashpower after a 26% year-to-date price decline and redeploy power to AI and cloud services.
On July 26, 2026, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty fell 0.74% at block 959,616, marking the network’s 15th difficulty adjustment of 2026. Miners reduced hashpower after a 26% year-to-date decline in bitcoin’s price and redeployed power to AI and cloud services.
The change makes it slightly easier to find a block. The tally for 2026 now stands at nine difficulty reductions and six increases, covering block heights 931,392 through 959,616. The difficulty metric adjusts to keep average block times close to ten minutes.
Since Jan. 1, mining difficulty has fallen from 146.47 trillion to 126.23 trillion, a decline of 13.82%. Cumulative increases in 2026 total 31.04% while cumulative decreases total 43.96%. Between Jan. 8 and July 25, 28,224 blocks were mined and the average adjustment size was 6.4 percentage points.
Miner revenue measures declined over the same period. Over the past 206 days the estimated daily value of one petahash per second, or hashprice, fell from $37.39 to $32.21. Bitcoin’s market price is down 26% year to date.
Several large-scale mining firms with long-term power contracts and site infrastructure are leasing capacity to customers building AI training clusters and cloud services. Operators are repurposing power and facilities so machines run other computational workloads when mining revenue is low.
The protocol’s difficulty algorithm trims the target as aggregate hashpower changes to maintain roughly ten-minute block intervals. Future difficulty adjustments will reflect changes in bitcoin’s price and miner economics.
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