Bitcoin has traded below estimated mining costs for five straight months, according to JPMorgan analysts, leaving nearly one in five miners unprofitable and forcing 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 the bitcoin mining economy is “very bad” in 2026. JPMorgan puts the current cost of producing every bitcoin at about $78,000, a figure that comes from electricity, hardware depreciation, and high costs for all public miners.
With bitcoin trading near $63,000, the gap between the spot price and the breakeven has created a continued squeeze across the sector.
One of the most notable changes JPMorgan flags is a structural change in the way the Bitcoin network itself reacts to price movements. The beta of mining difficulty in BTC prices – a measure of how much difficulty goes into a given movement in price – has risen to 0.62 in the last six months. That figure shows a network where a high proportion of miners are staying at or near the bottom of their costs, switching machines or shutting them down as prices change rather than maintaining consistent performance.
The pattern began to emerge in early June, when mining difficulty fell 10.09%, its second largest single drop of the year. Bitcoin’s hashrate fell by 12% in June, according to Galaxy Research. A 10% weight loss occurred in January, marking two episodes of this scale within one calendar year.
Financial difficulties have forced publicly traded miners into a corner. Operators including MARA, CleanSpark, Riot Platforms, Cango, Core Scientific, and Bitdeer sold a combined 32,000 bitcoins in Q1 2026 alone to finance operating costs, according to data from TheEnergyMag cited in a JPMorgan report. That figure exceeds the number of companies sold bitcoin in all of 2025, and sets a new quarterly record – surpassing the previous high of 20,000 bitcoin set in Q2 2022, during the bear market that followed the collapse of Terra-Luna.
Hashprice, a metric that captures mining revenue per unit of computing power, is sitting at around $33 per petahash per second per day, according to the Hashrate Index. That rate puts nearly 20% of the global mining industry in unprofitable territory, according to CoinShares’ Q1 2026 Bitcoin Mining Report, which JPMorgan cited in its analysis.
Bitcoin contrarian signal
Despite the negative conditions, JPMorgan analysts stopped short of a bearish conclusion. The team noted that weak market sentiment of this nature has, in previous cycles, acted as a counter-indicator for future price increases.
They expect higher hashrate sensitivity and larger difficulty adjustments to continue as long as BTC stays below its production cost.
Additional acquisitions among high-cost operators are likely in the first half of 2026 without material price recovery. Miners collectively hold about 1.8 million bitcoin at press time, up from 1.86 million by the end of 2023, a sign that mining is a continuing feature of the current environment.
