Bitcoin’s 30-day simple moving average (SMA) hashrate has just posted its sharpest decline since the April 2024 halving, according to Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets research at VanEck. Hashrate represents the total computational power securing the Bitcoin network, making sharp moves in this metric a key signal of structural shifts on the mining side.

Scale of the decline and immediate drivers

Jack Kong, former chairman of Canaan, said that as many as 400,000 mining machines have recently gone offline in China. According to Kong, total computing power fell by roughly 100 exahashes per second (EH/s) in a single day, an estimated 8% drop. Assuming an average capacity of 250 terahashes per second (TH/s) per unit, this implies that more than 400,000 machines were shut down.

Kong also noted that mining farms in Xinjiang were shutting down one after another, suggesting that the United States benefited indirectly in terms of hashrate share without any direct intervention.

Economic pressure on miners

Data from Glassnode shows that total network hashrate has fallen from around 1.1 zettahashes per second (ZH/s) to just above 1 ZH/s. This retracement coincides with sustained pressure on miner revenues, with the hash price hovering near $37 per petahash per second (PH/s), close to a five-year low.

In the short term, miners may see some temporary relief. Bitcoin mining difficulty is currently projected to decline by roughly 3%, which would modestly improve miner economics. Difficulty now stands at about 148.2 trillion (T), just below its all-time high.

A pullback in hashrate does not necessarily signal long-term weakness for Bitcoin. Instead, it reflects the network’s built-in self-adjustment mechanism: as less efficient miners exit, conditions become more balanced for those that remain. Over the medium term, a recovery in Bitcoin’s price or a decline in energy costs could put hashrate back on a growth trajectory.