The second-largest negative adjustment of 2026 reflects the structural exodus of miners from the network, increasingly drawn to artificial intelligence workloads.
Bitcoin’s mining difficulty dropped 7.76% to 133.79 trillion at block 941,472, marking the second most significant negative adjustment of the current year on Saturday, March 21, according to data from CloverPool and CoinWarz. Average block times in the previous epoch had stretched to approximately 12 minutes and 36 seconds, well beyond the protocol’s 10-minute target, triggering an automatic downward recalibration.
In early February, difficulty had already plunged 11.16% – the worst reading since China’s 2021 mining ban – when Winter Storm Fern had taken approximately 200 EH/s offline. The subsequent 14.7% rebound recorded on February 20, the highest ever observed, had pushed the hashrate back above 1,000 EH/s, but the effect proved temporary. The current level of 133.79 trillion sits approximately 10% below the 148 trillion at which 2026 began, and far from the all-time high of roughly 155 trillion reached in November 2025.
The network hashrate settled between 903 and 948 EH/s depending on the source, below the record 1 zettahash level reached in 2025. The hashprice – the metric measuring expected revenue per unit of computational power – hovers around $32 per petahash per second per day according to the Luxor Hashrate Index, a level at or below the break-even point for a wide range of hardware. On February 23, hashprice had hit an all-time low of approximately $28/PH/s/day.
The difficulty decline also reflects a structural shift: a growing number of publicly listed miners are reallocating infrastructure away from Bitcoin mining toward artificial intelligence workloads. Core Scientific has stated it expects to sell the majority of its Bitcoin treasury in 2026 to fund expansion into AI and high-performance computing. Bitdeer fully liquidated its Bitcoin reserves to zero in February, becoming the largest publicly listed miner by self-mining hashrate to hold no BTC on its balance sheet. Cango, Riot Platforms, TeraWulf, IREN, CleanSpark, and Bitfarms have all outlined similar diversification strategies in recent quarters. HIVE Digital Technologies launched its first AI GPU cluster in Paraguay in recent days. Matthew Sigel, Head of Digital Asset Research at VanEck, stated that miners are “sitting on a gold mine” in terms of the value of their secured energy capacity for AI applications.
