Bitcoin’s estimated mining production cost sits at roughly $54,939, and the network’s marquee asset hasn’t dipped below that floor. That’s a notable data point at a time when miners are navigating some of the toughest economics the industry has seen since the latest halving slashed block rewards in half.
Hashrate tells the real story
Bitcoin’s hashrate peaked at approximately 995 EH/s in April 2026. That’s just a hair below the psychologically significant 1 ZH/s (zetahash) threshold. It has since settled to around 959 EH/s.
But something unusual happened in 2026. The network recorded its first quarterly drop in hashrate in six years. Not because of a price crash or regulatory crackdown, but because miners started redirecting their computational firepower toward a different target entirely: artificial intelligence.
The great AI pivot
