Bitcoin has spent five straight months trading below what it costs to produce, putting pressure on miners and forcing some to sell, JPMorgan said in a note. The bank pegs the cost of mining one bitcoin at about $78,000, well above the roughly $62,500 the asset currently fetches.
The strain is showing and about 20% of miners are now unprofitable, the bank said, citing data from CoinShares, and publicly traded miners sold more than 32,000 bitcoins in the first quarter to cover operating costs, more than they downloaded in all of 2025.
The network is adapting on its own. When the price drops below cost, the higher-cost miners are shut down, the hashrate, or the total computing power protecting the network, drops, and the mining difficulty, the automatic setting for how difficult it is to mine, is reset to a lower level.
That happened in early June, when difficulty fell 10%, the second drop of that size this year.
Miners are also reacting faster than before. JPMorgan says the sensitivity of difficulty to price has increased, with more traders sitting near the breakeven point and turning machines on or off as prices change. The bank expects larger and more frequent adjustments as long as bitcoin remains below its cost of production.
The outlook is cautious, but JPMorgan points to a silver lining. The weak sentiment around the sector could itself be a contrary bullish signal, echoing the series of accumulation readings, from whale buying to falling foreign exchange reserves, which point in the same direction this month.
