Bitcoin hashrate is nearly back at its peak. Miner margins are not
Hashrate has rebounded toward 1 ZH/s while hashprice slips back to the mid-$30s. We look at what the data says about who can still mine at a profit.
MININGBITCOINANALYSIS
Daniel Hartley
10/28/20263 min read
Bitcoin mining in late October 2026 presents a paradox. The network's computing power has climbed back to within a few percent of its record, yet the revenue each unit of that power earns has been sliding for a month. The gap between those two lines says more about the state of the industry than any single miner's earnings report.
The rebound in numbers
According to Glassnode data cited by BeInCrypto, the 14-day average hashrate peaked near 1.135 ZH/s in late 2025, fell roughly 22% into February and spent the spring and summer testing a floor near 870 EH/s. By late October it was back around 1.06 ZH/s. Difficulty, which follows hashrate with a lag, jumped 5.92% to 140.58T on October 16, and mempool projections pointed to another increase of a similar size around October 29. That would leave it only a few percent short of the 155.97T record set a year ago.
Price has not kept pace. Bitcoin traded around $80,000 this week, about 37% below its October 2025 all-time high. Hashprice, the dollar revenue a miner earns per petahash per day, fell to roughly $36 on October 25 according to Luxor's Hashrate Index, about 11% lower than a month earlier. That is well above June's all-time monthly low of $27.7 recorded by CoinShares, but a long way from the $60-plus levels miners enjoyed in mid-2025.
Why margins are tightening
The mechanism is simple. Every two weeks the protocol resets difficulty so that blocks keep arriving roughly every ten minutes. When more machines join and the price stays flat, each machine earns a smaller slice of a fixed issuance of 3.125 BTC per block. Transaction fees, which once cushioned miners during busy periods, have hovered near decade lows as a share of miner revenue this year, so they offer almost no offset.
Cost data shows how thin the cushion is. CoinShares calculated that the weighted average cash cost of production among listed miners was about $75,500 per bitcoin in the second quarter, against realised revenue of roughly $72,000 per coin over the same period. JPMorgan's estimate of the industry's production cost, around $85,000, sits above the current spot price. With bitcoin hovering near $80,000 and difficulty rising, a large part of the listed sector is mining at or near break-even on a cash basis, before corporate overhead is counted.
The averages hide a wide spread. In the same CoinShares study, cash costs ranged from under $44,000 per coin at the cheapest operator to more than $200,000 at the most expensive. Power contracts, fleet efficiency and the share of overhead now going into AI projects explain most of the difference. For the most efficient miners, current conditions are uncomfortable but workable. For the rest, they strengthen the case for redeploying power elsewhere.
Who is adding the hashrate
If public miners are cutting back, someone else is plugging in. BlocksBridge Consulting estimates that public miners' realised hashrate fell about 15% in the first half of the year as several companies moved capacity toward AI and high-performance computing. Bitdeer is a notable exception: its self-mining hashrate reached 82.3 EH/s in September, against about 35 EH/s a year earlier. Retired rigs from listed companies are also finding buyers among smaller operators with cheap power, and Luxor linked September's jump to Texas fleets coming back online after the grid's summer peak.
That shift matters for how the network behaves. Smaller private operators often run older, less efficient machines on stranded or curtailed energy, which makes them highly sensitive to hashprice. They switch off quickly when revenue drops and return just as fast when it improves. A larger share of this flexible capacity can make hashrate swing more sharply around price moves, and make difficulty adjustments larger in both directions.
What to watch next
Three indicators will show whether the squeeze deepens. The first is the late-October difficulty adjustment: another large increase without a matching price move would push hashprice lower still. The second is IREN's planned exit from bitcoin mining by December 31, which would remove around 23 EH/s and could ease competition for the miners that remain. The third is the price itself. CoinShares has framed bitcoin holding above $70,000 as a key test for miner balance sheets this year, and that line still marks the zone where weaker operators would start to unplug.
For now, the network looks healthy and the businesses that secure it look stretched. A new hashrate record would signal confidence in Bitcoin's long-term security, but it would also mean more machines sharing the same block reward. Until price or fees rise, that trade-off will define the mining sector heading into 2027.