Bitcoin Difficulty Falls 1.1% After Public Miners Sell Record BTC

Bitcoin mining difficulty fell about 1.1% to roughly 135.5 trillion on Saturday as publicly traded mining companies disclosed large BTC sales in the first quarter of 2026. An analytics platform estimates the next scheduled difficulty adjustment will increase the target to about 137.43 trillion on May 1, 2026.

Mining difficulty measures how hard it is to add new blocks to the Bitcoin blockchain. The protocol adjusts difficulty roughly every 2,016 blocks to keep the average time between blocks near 10 minutes. When the network’s total computational power, or hash rate, falls or miners go offline, difficulty can decline; when hash rate rises, difficulty increases.

Public miners Marathon Digital, CleanSpark, Riot Platforms, Cango, Core Scientific and Bitdeer reported combined sales exceeding 32,000 BTC in Q1 2026. Those disclosures show the amount sold in the quarter exceeded the total sold across all four quarters of 2025 and topped roughly 20,000 BTC sold in the second quarter of 2022. Mining firms commonly sell mined BTC to cover expenses billed in fiat currency, including electricity, equipment leases and payroll.

Operational pressures on miners have increased since the April 2024 block reward halving, which reduced the number of newly minted BTC per block. Energy costs rose in several regions, and a market correction between October and December 2025 lowered BTC’s price from about $125,000 to near $86,000. An asset manager’s Q1 2026 mining report estimated up to 20% of miners were operating at a loss under prevailing conditions and noted, “Q4 2025 marked the most challenging quarter for Bitcoin miners since the April 2024 halving.”

The recent drop in difficulty provides a short-term easing in the computational effort required to produce blocks. The projected increase in early May would raise the network’s difficulty and the computing power needed to secure new blocks.