Bitcoin's mining difficulty has fallen 19.9% from its November 2025 peak, the third deepest drawdown since dedicated mining chips took over the network. Miners are selling bitcoin at a record pace and redirecting power capacity toward AI data centers as revenue from mining alone no longer covers costs for a growing share of the fleet.
Bitcoin's mining difficulty has dropped 19.9% from its November 2025 peak of roughly 156 trillion to 126.23 trillion after the July 25 adjustment, the third deepest decline since application-specific mining chips became standard. Only the aftermath of China's 2021 mining ban and a 2018 bear-market contraction went deeper.
Hashrate keeps falling
Hashrate has declined roughly 12% from its late-2025 peak above one zettahash per second to about 868 exahashes per second by late July, with Bitcoin Magazine Pro tracking 287 consecutive days of downward trend. Difficulty has also turned negative year over year for only the second time in bitcoin's history, an emphasis last seen after China's 2021 mining ban forced an estimated 50% of global hashrate offline within weeks. However, this time no single policy triggered the drop.
Revenue compression squeezes operators
Since the halving, miners earn 3.125 BTC per block, half what they earned before. Bitcoin traded near $63,100 on July 31, down about 47% over 12 months and nearly 50% below its October 2025 record.
As a result, per-block dollar revenue has fallen from about $750,000 near bitcoin's October 2025 peak to approximately $197,000 today, a 74% decline in under a year. Hashprice stood near $32 per petahash per day in late July, below breakeven for many operators; CoinShares estimated in March 2026 that 15% to 20% of the global mining fleet was running at a loss.
Record selling funds an AI pivot
Therefore, publicly traded miners sold more than 32,000 BTC in the first quarter of 2026, exceeding their combined sales for all of 2025 and surpassing the roughly 20,000 BTC sold during the 2022 Terra Luna collapse. Hut 8 signed a second 15-year lease on July 20 for 352 megawatts at its Beacon Point campus in Texas, lifting its total contracted AI portfolio to $26.6 billion, while Core Scientific followed on July 28 with an AMD partnership covering about 530 megawatts.
As a result, according to research cited by industry analysts, a basket of mining equities gained 56% in early 2026 while bitcoin fell 17%, as investors increasingly price miners as energy-infrastructure companies rather than bitcoin proxies. Some of the hashrate leaving bitcoin mining today may not come back even if prices recover, since AI contracts now pay more than mining ever did.
Source: crypto.news
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