Bitcoin hash rate has stabilized pic.twitter.com/9uIXjuTcdL
— Zach Pandl (@LowBeta) October 14, 2026
Operational factors behind the mining contraction
The loss of installed capacity was primarily driven by margin compression following the price pullback from its October 2025 highs. An industry source stated in September 2026 that computing power retreated from 1,160 exahashes per second (EH/s) to 850 EH/s in the first week of February 2026. This shift represented a 26.72% drop over the analyzed period.
The report attributes this hardware disconnection to three concurrent variables: depressed spot prices, elevated algorithmic difficulty levels, and low transaction fee volume on the base layer.
Direct revenue per processing unit suffered severe deterioration by mid-year. Industry data places the hashprice at a monthly average of $27.70 per petahash per second per day (PH/s/day) during June 2026.
Industry specialists note that this revenue level failed to cover operational costs in mining farms running older-generation ASIC hardware.
Compounding these market factors were direct pressures on energy tariffs. In major mining hubs such as Texas, operators faced seasonal electricity price hikes and winter weather disruptions. Market reports indicate that several facilities powered down portions of their operations to curtail load back to the grid or migrated capacity toward AI infrastructure data centers.
The recovery toward levels near 1 ZH/s suggests that companies with efficient hardware and fixed-price power purchase agreements are capturing the market share left behind by less profitable competitors.
Monitoring desks are now looking ahead to the upcoming Bitcoin network difficulty adjustment, scheduled to conclude within the next 150 blocks of the two-week cycle, an event that will formally recalibrate the production cost of each block.
