Largest negative reduction since Chinese ban, hashrate down 20% in the past month.
Bitcoin mining difficulty crashed 11.16% on Saturday, dropping to 125.86 trillion at block 935,424, according to data from Mempool explorer. This represents the largest negative reduction since the Chinese ban in July 2021 and the tenth largest percentage drop in Bitcoin’s history.
The adjustment came from 141.67 trillion, with average block times having reached approximately 11.4 minutes before the retarget, well above the protocol’s 10-minute target. The decline was driven by approximately a 20% drop in the network’s total hashrate over the past month. Luxor’s Hashrate Index shows that hashrate fell 11% in the last week alone to about 863 EH/s, down from all-time highs above 1.1 ZH/s reached in October.
Two factors caused this hashrate crash. Bitcoin’s price has plummeted over 45% from October’s all-time high above $126,000, dropping to around $60,000 on February 5th before bouncing back to approximately $68,800 on Saturday. Winter storm Fern in late January also forced miners in U.S. energy regions to curtail operations: the storm took roughly 200 EH/s offline, with Foundry USA‘s hashrate dropping about 60%.
Hashprice, the metric tracking miners’ expected revenue per unit of computing power, hit a spot all-time low of $33.31 per petahash per second per day on February 2nd and a minimum daily average of $34.91/PH/s/day on February 1st, according to Luxor’s Ben Harper. The $40/PH/s/day threshold is considered the level below which miners must decide whether to keep machines running. The average cost to mine one bitcoin is approximately $87,000 according to Checkonchain data.
This adjustment exceeds the previous largest negative difficulty drop since 2021: a decline of approximately 7.5% in June 2025 caused by hashrate reductions related to summer heat waves. Only the newest Antminer S23 machines are currently seeing healthy returns, while older models, including Whatsminer M6 rigs and Antminer S21 units, are approaching unprofitability or already operating at a loss according to Antpool data.
