The mining economy deteriorated in 2026, analysts noted, with bitcoin trading below its estimated cost of production for five straight months. Citing CoinShares’ first-quarter mining report, JPMorgan said that around 20% of miners are currently believed to be unprofitable.
Financial pressure has prompted miners to sell more bitcoins. Publicly traded mining companies liquidated more than 32,000 BTC in the first quarter, surpassing their combined sales for all of 2025, according to data cited by the report.
As a result, even relatively small price changes increasingly affect network activity. When bitcoin falls below production costs, higher cost operators tend to shut down their equipment, leading to a drop in hashrate and an adjustment in mining difficulty. The bank pointed to the second week of June, when mining difficulties fell by 10%, the second drop of this magnitude this year.
Looking ahead, analysts expect increased hashrate sensitivity and mining difficulties to persist as long as bitcoin remains below its estimated cost of production, which the bank currently estimates to be around $78,000. The world’s largest cryptocurrency was trading around $64,700 at press time.
Bitcoin miners are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) to diversify their revenue as mining margins come under pressure.
The appeal is simple: AI hosting contracts can provide stable, multi-year revenue streams and higher margins than the more volatile economics of Bitcoin mining, which have been crushed by growing network competition and the 2024 halving.
