Public Bitcoin miners spent years racing to add more hashrate to the network. In the first quarter of 2026, many of them did the opposite.
This article first appeared in Miner Weekly, a weekly newsletter by Blocksbridge Consulting curating the latest news in energy, compute, infrastructure, and data analysis from The Energy Mag. The original article can be viewed here.
Bitcoin’s average network hashrate, based on public blockchain data, declined from roughly 985 EH/s in Q4 2025 to 873 EH/s in Q1 2026. Separately, TheEnergyMag compiled quarterly production disclosures from major publicly traded miners to calculate their respective realized hashrate implied from Bitcoin production results.
At first glance, the aggregate change among large public miners appeared relatively modest. The combined realized hashrate of 10 major ones tracked by TheEnergyMag declined only slightly from approximately 297 EH/s in Q4 2025 to 291 EH/s in Q1 2026. HIVE and Cango (NYSE: CANG) were excluded from the comparison because their first-quarter production data was incomplete.
But beneath that seemingly stable aggregate figure was a much more notable redistribution of industrial-scale hashing power.
