The Bitcoin network has just recorded its third increase in difficulty since the start of the year. Good news on the surface, but behind this technical rebound lies a much darker reality for miners. And current signals are already announcing an imminent reversal.
Read us on Google News
In brief
- Bitcoin difficulty increased by 3.87% at block 943,488, after a decrease of 7.76% in the previous period.
- Overall hashrate recovered by 60.45 EH/s, going from 1,022 EH/s to 961.55 EH/s.
- An estimated difficulty reduction of 14.27% is expected during the next adjustment on April 19, 2026.
- The daily hash price caps at $30.67/PH/s, one of the lowest levels in the network’s history.
An eye-catching adjustment
At block 943,488, Bitcoin’s difficulty increased by 3.87%. This adjustment occurred on April 4, 2026, after a week of particularly slow blocks. This is the seventh adjustment of the year, with a balance of three increases for four decreases, proof that the network is going through a period of unusual instability.
This rebound follows a fall of 7.76% during the previous period. On a technical level, the difficulty is now 138.97 trillion times higher than it was when Bitcoin launched. A dizzying figure which illustrates how far we have come since the first blocks mined from a desktop computer.
However, this rebound holds on sand. As of 4 p.m. Eastern, only 181 of the current 2,016 blocks had been mined, putting the network about 9% away from the next adjustment.
Data from hashrateindex.com indicates an average block time of 11 minutes and 39 seconds, well above the target pace of 10 minutes. At this rate, estimates point to a difficulty reduction of 14.27% on April 19.
The reason for this slowdown? A clear drop in hashrate. At the end of March, the total computing power of the network had briefly crossed the symbolic milestone of 1,000 exahash per second (EH/s), or 1 zettahash. Since then, it has fallen by 60.45 EH/s to settle at 961.55 EH/s. This withdrawal is not trivial.
Bitcoin miners out of breath
This decline in hashrate is not a coincidence, it is a signal of an industry under pressure. The daily hash price, at $30.67 per petahash per second (PH/s), is near its all-time lows.
As a reminder, a similar level was observed in February 2026, when a winter storm forced operators like Foundry USA to urgently shut down their machines.
Today, it’s not the weather that’s suffocating the miners, it’s the economy. With transaction fees representing just 0.56% of the block reward, ancillary revenue offers no safety net. And 106,335 blocks still remain to be mined before the next halving, which means that conditions will continue to get tougher.
Faced with this compression of margins, a major trend is accelerating: large mining companies are diverting their computing power towards artificial intelligence. Renting your servers to AI platforms today brings in much more than mining Bitcoin. Riot Platforms, which sold 3,778 BTC in the first quarter of 2026, is the perfect illustration of this.
Paradoxically, it was in this depressed climate that a solo miner connected to CKPool managed to validate block 943,411 in early April, winning 3,139 BTC, or approximately $210,000. An extremely rare feat in a sector dominated by industrial farms, but which reminds us that Bitcoin retains, despite everything, a degree of unpredictability.
The adjustment mechanism, the safeguard of the network
Bitcoin is designed to withstand this type of turbulence. If miners abandon and the hashrate decreases, the difficulty automatically drops every 2,016 blocks, making mining accessible and profitable again for new entrants. This is exactly what the data anticipates for April 19.
This self-regulation mechanism, imagined by Satoshi Nakamoto, remains one of the most underestimated assets of the Bitcoin protocol. It guarantees the continuity of the network, whatever the market conditions or the decisions of economic players.
The real question now is not whether the difficulty will drop, it very likely will. It’s a question of how many Bitcoin miners will last until conditions become favorable again.
