Bitcoin's mining difficulty fell 7.76% to 133.79 trillion in its latest biweekly adjustment on Saturday at block height 941,472, according to data from CloverPool and CoinWarz. The drop is the second-largest negative adjustment of 2026, trailing only the 11.16% plunge on Feb. 7, which was the steepest decline since China's sweeping mining ban in 2021.

Average block times during the prior epoch stretched to roughly 12 minutes and 36 seconds, according to CloverPool, well above the protocol's 10-minute target and triggering the automatic downward recalibration.

The adjustment caps a turbulent stretch for the network. Difficulty plummeted 11% in early February as Winter Storm Fern knocked an estimated 200 EH/s offline and bitcoin's price fell below $70,000. A record 14.7% upward rebound followed on Feb. 20 as hashrate recovered to above 1,000 EH/s, The Block previously reported. But that bounce proved short-lived: the latest reading at 133.79 trillion sits roughly 10% below the 148 trillion level where the year began, and far below the Nov. 2025 all-time high near 155 trillion.

Bitcoin was trading near $70,370 on Saturday, according to The Block's Bitcoin Price page. That remains well below the average production cost of roughly $87,000 per coin cited by Checkonchain in The Block's Feb. 7 report. JPMorgan analysts estimated in February that the network's production cost had fallen from $90,000 to $77,000 as high-cost operators exited though even that lower figure remains above spot.

Hashprice, the metric tracking expected miner revenue per unit of computing power, is currently hovering around $33.30 per petahash per second per day, according to Luxor's Hashrate Index. That level is at or below breakeven for a wide range of mining hardware. Hashprice hit an all-time low of about $28/PH/s/day on Feb. 23 following the recovery from the worst of the winter storm disruptions.

The AI exodus

The difficulty decline reflects more than just cyclical price pressure. A growing number of publicly traded miners are actively reallocating infrastructure from bitcoin mining toward artificial intelligence workloads, a trend that The Block's 2026 Mining Outlook warned could gradually reduce network hashpower and weaken bitcoin's security over time.

Core Scientific has said it expects to sell the majority of its bitcoin treasury in 2026 to fund its AI and high-performance computing expansion, as The Block reported earlier this month. Bitdeer fully liquidated its bitcoin reserves to zero in February, becoming the largest publicly traded miner by self-mining hashrate to hold no BTC on its balance sheet. As of its March 21 weekly update, Bitdeer's holdings remained at zero. 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 just days ago, the latest miner to begin processing non-bitcoin compute workloads. VanEck's Head of Digital Asset Research Matthew Sigel said earlier this month that miners are "sitting on a gold mine" in terms of their secured power capacity's value for AI applications.

Structural versus cyclical

The pattern emerging in 2026 suggests a structural shift beyond the typical post-halving shakeout. Transaction fees as a share of total miner revenue have collapsed from roughly 7% in 2024 to about 1%, as The Block's 2026 outlook noted, leaving miners almost entirely dependent on the block subsidy and, by extension, on bitcoin's price.

A VanEck report published Thursday found that while long-term holder selling has slowed, miner selling pressure has remained steady rather than intensifying, even as economics tightened. Aggregate miner balances stood at roughly 684,000 BTC, down only 0.5% year-over-year, though VanEck noted miners have effectively sold the entirety of newly issued supply over that period.

History offers some comfort for bulls. VanEck noted in December that bitcoin has posted positive 90-day forward returns 65% of the time during periods of shrinking hashrate.