Mining economics have deteriorated in 2026, the analysts noted, with bitcoin trading below its estimated production cost for five consecutive months. Citing CoinShares’ first-quarter mining report, JPMorgan said roughly 20% of miners are currently estimated to be unprofitable.
Financial pressure has prompted 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 by the report.
As a result, even relatively small price moves are increasingly affecting network activity. When bitcoin falls below production costs, higher-cost operators tend to shut down equipment, causing hashrate to decline and mining difficulty to adjust lower. The bank pointed to the second week of June, when mining difficulty dropped 10%, the second decline of that magnitude this year.
Looking ahead, the analysts expect heightened sensitivity in hashrate and mining difficulty to persist as long as bitcoin remains below its estimated production cost, which the bank currently puts at about $78,000. The world’s laregst cryptocurrency was trading around $64,700 at publication time.
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 straightforward: AI hosting contracts can provide stable, multi-year revenue streams and higher margins than the more volatile economics of bitcoin mining, which have been squeezed by rising network competition and the 2024 halving.