Bitcoin has traded below the estimated cost of mining it for five straight months, according to JPMorgan analysts, leaving roughly one in five miners unprofitable and prompting publicly listed operators to sell a record volume of coins.
In a note to clients distributed this week, analysts led by managing director Nikolaos Panigirzoglou said the economics of bitcoin mining “worsened” in 2026. Places The current all-in-one production cost of Bitcoin is around $78,000, a figure derived from electricity, hardware depreciation, and overhead across public miners.
With Bitcoin trading close $63,000 The gap between the spot price and the breakeven price has created persistent pressure across the sector.
One of the most notable shifts that JPMorgan flags is a structural change in how the Bitcoin network itself responds to price movements. The mining difficulty beta for Bitcoin prices — a measure of how difficult it is for a given price move — has risen to 0.62 over the past six months. This number reflects a network in which a larger percentage of miners are sitting at or near the cost floor, turning machines on or off as prices change rather than maintaining consistent operations.
This pattern became evident in early June, when mining difficulty fell by 10.09%, the second largest single decline of the year. Bitcoin hash rate decreased 12% in June, according to Galaxy Research. A similar difficulty drawdown of 10% occurred in January, marking two episodes of that metric within a single calendar year.
Financial pressures have pushed publicly traded mining companies into a corner. Operators including MARA, CleanSpark, Riot Platforms, Cango, Core Scientific and Bitdeer sold a total of 32,000 Bitcoin in the first quarter of 2026 alone to fund operating expenses, according to Data From TheEnergyMag cited in JPMorgan report. This figure exceeds the total Bitcoin sales of these companies for the entire year of 2025, and sets a new quarterly record – surpassing the previous record of 20,000 BTC set in the second quarter of 2022, during the bear market that followed the collapse of Terra-Luna.
Hash Price, A metric Which captures mining revenue per unit of computing power, is about $33 per petahash per second per day, according to the Hashrate Index. This level puts roughly 20% of the global mining industry in unprofitable territory, according to CoinShares’ Q1 2026 Bitcoin Mining Report, which JPMorgan cited in its analysis.
Conflicting signal for Bitcoin
Despite the gloomy conditions, JPMorgan analysts stopped short of reaching a bearish conclusion. The team noted that weak market sentiment of this kind had, in past sessions, served as a contrarian indicator of future price increases.
They expect the higher hash sensitivity and larger difficulty adjustments to continue as long as BTC remains well below the cost of production.
Further capitulation among higher-cost operators is possible in the first half of 2026 without a recovery in material prices. Miners collectively owned roughly 1.8 million bitcoins at press time, down from 1.86 million at the end of 2023, a sign that treasury withdrawals are an ongoing feature of the current environment.
