Bitcoin has spent five straight months trading below what it costs to produce, stifling miners and forcing some to sell, JPMorgan said in a note. The bank pegs the cost of mining one bitcoin at around $78,000, well above the roughly $62,500 the asset currently fetches.
The strain is showing and around 20% of miners are now unprofitable, the bank said citing CoinShares data, and publicly traded miners sold more than 32,000 bitcoins in the first quarter to cover operating costs, more than they offloaded in all of 2025.
The network adapts itself. When price falls below cost, the most expensive miners turn off, the hashrate or total computing power securing the network decreases, and mining difficulty, the automatic setting indicating the difficulty of mining, resets downward.
This happened in early June, when difficulty dropped 10%, the second drop of this magnitude this year.
Miners are also responding more quickly than before. JPMorgan says the price sensitivity of distress has increased, with more traders nearing break-even and turning machines on or off as prices move. The bank expects larger and more frequent adjustments as long as bitcoin remains below its cost of production.
The outlook is cautious, but JPMorgan signals upside potential. The weak sentiment around the sector could itself prove a contrarian bullish signal, echoing the string of accumulation figures, from whale buying to falling foreign exchange reserves, pointing in the same direction this month.
