Bitcoin mining difficulty to fall about 9.6% after hashrate slip

The Bitcoin network’s mining difficulty is expected to drop about 9.55% at the next adjustment in roughly eight hours, lowering the computational work required to mine a block for the upcoming two-week epoch.

The reduction will increase the amount of Bitcoin miners earn per unit of active hashrate by more than 9% if other factors remain unchanged. Hashprice, a measure of daily mining revenue per petahash per second, fell below $30/PH/s after the early June price decline and could rise back above that level if bitcoin’s market price and transaction fees remain steady.

Network hashrate averaged near 1 zettahash per second (ZH/s) at the end of May, fell to about 861 exahashes per second (EH/s) around June 10, and has recovered modestly to roughly 894 EH/s in recent days. Bitcoin briefly traded near $60,000 in early June before moving higher toward the mid-$60,000s.

Operators removed hashrate for several reasons. Less efficient, older-generation mining machines were switched off as revenue fell. Some public miners unplugged rigs or paused growth while retrofitting sites to host high-performance computing and artificial intelligence workloads, which uses the same power capacity but reduces mining load. In Texas, the start of the four coincident peak (4CP) season led large customers to curtail during specific monthly peak windows that affect next year’s transmission-cost allocation, temporarily lowering mining activity in the region.

The recent partial recovery in hashrate suggests some early June reductions were temporary curtailments rather than permanent shutdowns. Difficulty adjustments occur every 2,016 blocks, about every two weeks, and aim to keep average block times near 10 minutes by changing the target computational difficulty when hashrate shifts.

A near-9.6% difficulty decline raises yield per unit of hashpower but does not reduce fixed costs such as facility overhead, debt service or expansion spending. Operators with more efficient equipment and lower electricity costs will see the largest immediate increases in revenue per hash, while sites with older hardware or higher power rates may remain under pressure unless bitcoin prices or transaction fees improve.