Bitcoin set for 10.3% mining difficulty drop

The Bitcoin network will reduce mining difficulty by about 10.3% to roughly 124.25 trillion at block 953,568 on June 13. The automated adjustment lowers the metric from 138.96 trillion and is the second-largest single-day drop this year after an 11.16% fall in February. It ranks among the 11 largest downward difficulty changes since Bitcoin launched in 2009 and is the third top-20 decline recorded so far in the calendar year.

The decline in difficulty follows sustained pressure on miner margins. Bitcoin’s spot price is down about 30% year-to-date and recently slid roughly 15% in June to trade in the low $60,000s. Data compiled by Capriole Investments places average aggregate production cost at about $62,650. Capriole founder Charles Edwards wrote on X that “Miners are now just breaking even on average.”

Transaction fees earned by miners over the past 12 months have fallen to levels not seen since 2019. Fee revenue has contracted after successive block-reward halving events reduced the subsidy miners receive. Several public mining firms have shifted portions of their data centers toward high-performance computing for artificial intelligence workloads to diversify revenue streams.

Total network hashrate has remained relatively stable despite the financial pressure, driven in part by a widening efficiency gap between legacy rigs and newer machines. Secondary-market prices for mining hardware have dropped as much as 62% over the past year, allowing well-capitalized operators to buy and deploy next-generation units.

An older Antminer S19j Pro runs at about 104 terahashes per second (TH/s) while consuming roughly 3,068 watts, an efficiency near 29.5 joules per terahash (J/TH). The newer Antminer S21 XP delivers 270 TH/s at about 3,645 watts for roughly 13.5 J/TH; with custom firmware it can reach about 298 TH/s at the same power draw, improving to about 12.2 J/TH. That represents roughly a 59% reduction in energy consumed per terahash compared with the older model.

On-chain indicators show miner revenue weakening but not a full sector shutdown. The Puell Multiple, which compares miners’ daily revenue to its one-year average, trended lower and stood near 0.74 on June 10 with a raw reading of 0.58. Historical lows for the 30-day average reached about 0.45 near the 2022 bottom and 0.33 in December 2018. The price-to-miner-revenue multiple was near 80, compared with roughly 33 at the 2022 low. A separate gauge that tracks price change since the last difficulty bottom recorded a drawdown of about 21%, exceeding a 15% threshold analysts use to mark heightened miner stress. CryptoQuant analyst Axel Adler noted several miner indicators have moved into stress levels seen after past halvings, though they have not matched the deeper shutdowns of 2018 and 2022.

The upcoming difficulty reduction will raise the probability that active hashrate earns block rewards, providing immediate operational relief for miners that remain online. Short-term outcomes for miners will depend on movements in Bitcoin’s price, transaction fee income and the liquidity of mining firms’ reserves.