The reason for the coming drop is simple: blocks are arriving late. Bitcoin targets roughly one block every 10 minutes. During the current epoch, blocks have averaged between 10 minutes and 46 seconds and 10 minutes and 50 seconds.
That computing power, known as hashrate, has been wobbling. After a summer slump, hashrate climbed back above 1 ZH/s in October. November has been more cautious. Seven-day hashrate averages this month have fallen between 963 and 1,069 EH/s. One ZH/s equals 1,000 EH/s, so the network has been hovering around, and at times below, that milestone.
For comparison, the June adjustment cut difficulty by 10.09%. The upcoming move would be the steepest decline since then, though it would still fall short of that summer drop.
October’s climb and the record that won’t budge
The expected cut comes after a busy October. Two sharp difficulty increases that month raised the level by a combined 11.8%.
That run brought difficulty close to its all-time high of 155.97T, set in October 2025. The current reading sits about 4.9% below that peak.
Difficulty has now spent more than 374 days below its record. A downward adjustment would widen the gap again.
Several forces are shaping conditions on the ground. Seasonal energy curtailments, where miners power down to ease grid strain or avoid peak prices, can pull machines offline. Hashprice, the revenue miners earn per unit of computing power, has fluctuated around $33 to $35 per petahash per day.
Meanwhile, the Bitcoin price has been trading between $75,000 and $77,000.
How the self-correcting machine works
Every 2,016 blocks, the network looks at how long that batch actually took and recalibrates the difficulty to keep the average block time near 10 minutes.
There is no committee, no vote, no press release. The adjustment happens automatically, which is why projections can be made days in advance by looking at block timing within the current epoch.
What this means for miners and the market
The most direct beneficiaries are miners themselves. A lower difficulty means each machine has a better shot at winning blocks, so the same hardware produces more Bitcoin for the same electricity bill.
The miner revenue picture provides some useful context. Miner revenue reached approximately $1.215 billion in October, the highest monthly total since November 2025. So the coming cut is not arriving in a moment of crisis. It is arriving after a strong month, followed by a softer start to November.
There are a few things worth tracking from here. The first is whether the final adjustment lands closer to the low or high end of the 6.4% to 7.8% range, which depends on block times over the remaining blocks in the epoch.
The second is hashrate after the cut. A quick return above 1 ZH/s would signal that miners see the easier conditions as worth chasing, likely setting up another increase.
The third is the all-time high of 155.97T. October brought the network within striking distance. Whether difficulty can reclaim that level, and end a streak that has already run past 374 days, will say a lot about how much appetite miners have to keep expanding at current prices.
