Bitcoin's network mining difficulty fell 10.09% in mid-June, the second-largest downward adjustment of the year, as lower cryptocurrency prices and the migration of power capacity toward artificial-intelligence workloads pushed a growing number of miners offline.
The adjustment, which took effect at block 953,568, brought difficulty down from 138.9 trillion to 124.9 trillion. According to Galaxy Research, the move ranks as the eleventh-largest downward retarget in Bitcoin's history. It follows two previous difficulty reductions in 2026: an 11.16% drop in February and a 7.76% decline in March, illustrating how sustained price pressure is reshaping the economics of the mining industry.
Bitcoin prices slid below $60,000 in early June before rebounding above $64,000 on optimism surrounding a U.S.-Iran diplomatic accord. The selloff nonetheless squeezed miner profitability, pushing hashprice—the daily revenue earned per unit of hashing power—below $30 per petahash per second. Analysts say that threshold is a critical breakeven point for many mining operations: older-generation machines and operators with higher electricity costs are more likely to be switched off when revenue falls below that level.
Beyond price pressure, a secondary driver of the hashrate decline has been the reallocation of power infrastructure toward AI and high-performance computing. Several publicly traded mining companies have unplugged rigs or slowed expansion plans to retrofit sites for contracted AI data-center use, a strategy that removes bitcoin hashrate even when the underlying power capacity remains in use.
The reduced difficulty provides direct relief to miners that remained online. For the next two-week epoch, each Bitcoin block requires less computational work to mine, increasing the amount of Bitcoin active operators earn per unit of hashrate they run. The dynamic highlights a mining sector in transition: efficiency, power costs and access to alternative revenue streams—such as AI hosting contracts—are becoming decisive competitive advantages.
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