As a result of the latest recalculation, the mining difficulty of the leading cryptocurrency has dropped by 5.63% to 83.15 T. This decrease marks the most significant decline since December 2022.
At that time, Bitcoin was in a bearish market phase, largely due to a series of bankruptcies, including the collapses of Terra and FTX.
Since the previous adjustment, the average hash rate over a roughly two-week period has amounted to 595 EH/s compared to 630 EH/s previously. This suggests potential miner equipment shutdowns due to unprofitability post-halving.
The halving reduced the block reward from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC on April 20 at height #840,000.
On April 25, mining difficulty hit a maximum of 88.1 T. However, experts had previously predicted a drop in computational power after the halving for economic reasons. Estimates ranged from 15-20% among Galaxy Digital specialists to 5-10% among Hashlabs Mining co-founder Jaran Mullerud.
According to Glassnode, the smoothed 7-day moving average hash rate plummeted to 578.9 EH/s after reaching a record high of 649.7 EH/s on April 19 — a decrease of approximately 11%.
On halving day, miners earned $107.75 million, their highest daily income ever. This figure was largely driven by token issuance fees on the Runes protocol.
But by early May, daily #Bitcoin miner revenue had dropped to October 2023 levels.
According to the Hashrate Index, the hash price fell to $47 per PH per day. Before the halving, the figure ranged from $100-120.
In early April, CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju calculated that the cost of mining Bitcoin using Antminer S19 XP would increase from $40,000 to $80,000 after the block reward reduction. The expert took the top energy-efficient model in the S19 lineup, representatives of which still generate the majority of the network's computational power.
Mullerud provided a similar estimate of $75,000. Both experts focused on the U.S. market, which accounts for almost 38% of the global hash rate, according to the University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.
Recall that Marcus Tilen, head of research at 10x Research, suggested that miners could begin selling $5 billion worth of Bitcoin reserves to sustain their operations.
