Sunday, February 8, 2026

Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Drops by 11% Amid Steep Market Downturn

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The Bitcoin community mining issue, a metric monitoring the relative problem of including new blocks to the Bitcoin (BTC) ledger, fell by about 11.16% within the final 24 hours, the worst drop in a single adjustment interval since China’s 2021 ban on crypto mining.

Bitcoin mining issue is at 125.86 T and took impact at block 935,429, information from CoinWarz exhibits. The average block time is over 11 minutes, overshooting the 10-minute goal.

Difficulty is projected to fall once more within the subsequent adjustment on February 23 by about 10.4% to 112.7 T, in response to CoinWarz.

Mining, China, Bitcoin Mining, United States, Mining Pools
The Bitcoin community mining issue from 2014 to 2026. Supply: CoinWarz

China introduced a ban on crypto mining and started imposing a crackdown on digital belongings in Could 2021, leading to a number of downward issue changes between Could and July 2021, starting from 12.6% to 27.9%, in response to historic information from CoinWarz. 

The steep downward adjustment got here amid a broad crypto market downturn, which crashed the value of Bitcoin by over 50% from the all-time high of over $125,000 to a low of $60,000, and a winter storm within the US that triggered short-term miner downtime. 

Associated: Bitcoin’s ‘miner exodus’ could push BTC price below $60K

Winter Storm Fern sweeps by the US and curtails miner hashrate

A extreme winter storm swept through the United States in January, impacting 34 states throughout 2,000 sq. miles with snow, ice and freezing temperatures that disrupted electrical infrastructure.

Mining, China, Bitcoin Mining, United States, Mining Pools
Massive areas of the US skilled energy outages and repair disruptions throughout winter storm Fern. Supply: AccuWeather

The disruption to the facility grid triggered US-based Bitcoin miners to quickly curtail their vitality utilization and halt operations, lowering the full community hashrate, the quantity of computational energy expended by miners to secure the Bitcoin protocol.

Foundry USA, a US-based mining pool and the most important mining pool by hashrate on the planet, briefly lost about 60% of its hashing power amid winter storm Fern.

The mining pool’s complete hashing energy declined from almost 400 exahashes per second (EH/s) to about 198 EH/s in response to the storm. 

Mining, China, Bitcoin Mining, United States, Mining Pools
The market share of Bitcoin mining swimming pools. Supply: Hashrate Index

Foundry USA’s hashrate recovered to over 354 EH/s, the mining pool’s hashing energy on the time of this writing, and it nonetheless instructions 29.47% of the market share, according to Hashrate Index.

Nevertheless, the full Bitcoin community hashrate declined to a four-month low in January amid deteriorating crypto market circumstances and miners shifting operations to AI information facilities and different types of high-performance computing.

Journal: Bitcoin mining industry ‘going to be dead in 2 years’: Bit Digital CEO