Bitcoin has traded below the estimated cost to mine it for five straight months, according to JPMorgan analysts, leaving roughly one in five miners unprofitable and pushing publicly listed operators to sell a record volume of coins.
In a client note circulated this week, analysts led by managing director Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou said bitcoin mining economics have “worsened” in 2026. JPMorgan places the current all-in production cost of bitcoin at about $78,000, a figure derived from electricity, hardware depreciation, and overhead expenses across public miners.
With bitcoin trading near $63,000, the gap between spot price and breakeven has created a sustained squeeze across the sector.
One of the most notable shifts JPMorgan flags is a structural change in how the Bitcoin network itself responds to price movements. The beta of mining difficulty to BTC prices — a measure of how much difficulty moves for a given move in price — has risen to 0.62 over the past six months. That figure reflects a network in which a higher share of miners sit at or near their cost floor, switching machines on or off as prices shift rather than maintaining consistent operations.
The pattern became visible in early June, when mining difficulty fell 10.09%, its second-largest single decline of the year. Bitcoin’s hashrate dropped 12% in June, according to Galaxy Research. A comparable 10% difficulty drawdown occurred in January, marking two episodes of this scale within one calendar year.
The financial strain has pushed publicly traded miners into a corner. Operators including MARA, CleanSpark, Riot Platforms, Cango, Core Scientific, and Bitdeer sold a combined 32,000 bitcoin in Q1 2026 alone to fund operating expenses, according to data from TheEnergyMag cited in the JPMorgan report. That figure surpasses those companies’ total bitcoin sales for all of 2025, and it sets a new quarterly record — eclipsing the previous high of 20,000 bitcoin set in Q2 2022, during the bear market that followed the Terra-Luna collapse.
Hashprice, a metric that captures mining revenue per unit of computing power, sits at roughly $33 per petahash per second per day, according to Hashrate Index. That level places approximately 20% of the global mining industry in unprofitable territory, per CoinShares’ Q1 2026 Bitcoin Mining Report, which JPMorgan cited in its analysis.
A contrarian signal for bitcoin
Despite the grim conditions, JPMorgan’s analysts stopped short of a bearish conclusion. The team noted that weak market sentiment of this kind has, in past cycles, served as a contrarian indicator for future price appreciation.
They expect elevated hashrate sensitivity and larger difficulty adjustments to persist as long as BTC remains well below its production cost.
Further capitulation among higher-cost operators is possible in the first half of 2026 without a material price recovery. Miners collectively held approximately 1.8 million bitcoin at the time of publication, down from 1.86 million at the end of 2023, a sign that treasury drawdowns are an ongoing feature of the current environment.
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