The mining economy has deteriorated in 2026, analysts noted, with bitcoin trading below its estimated production cost for five consecutive months. Citing CoinShares’ first quarter mining report, JPMorgan said that approximately 20% of miners are currently estimated to be unprofitable.
The financial pressure has led miners to sell more bitcoin holdings. Publicly traded mining companies liquidated more than 32,000 BTC in the first quarter, exceeding their combined sales for all of 2025, according to data cited in the report.
As a result, even relatively small price movements are increasingly affecting network activity. When bitcoin falls below production costs, higher-cost operators tend to shut down equipment, causing the hash rate to decrease and mining difficulty to adjust downward. The bank highlighted the second week of June, when mining difficulty fell 10%, the second drop of that magnitude this year.
Looking ahead, analysts expect increased sensitivity in hashrate and mining difficulty to persist as long as bitcoin remains below its estimated production cost, which the bank currently estimates at around $78,000. The world’s largest cryptocurrency was trading around $64,700 at the time of this publication.
Bitcoin miners are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) to diversify revenue as mining margins come under pressure.
The appeal is simple: AI hosting contracts can provide stable, multi-year revenue streams and higher margins than the more volatile economics of bitcoin mining, which has been hit by increasing network competition and the 2024 halving.
