Bitcoin’s mining difficulty drops about 3.07% on Saturday, falling from 135.59 trillion to roughly 131.43 trillion at the network’s regular two-week adjustment. It is the sixth difficulty decrease of 2026 and the second consecutive drop, a streak that reflects an accelerating exodus of public miners shifting their machines, balance sheets, and identities from Bitcoin to artificial intelligence infrastructure. The relief lands as the network’s hashrate sits near 920 exahashes per second, well below the 1 zettahash per second peak recorded in 2025, while hashprice has rebounded to about $36.46 per petahash per day after touching a five-year low near $28 in late February.
Key takeaways
- Bitcoin difficulty drops 3.07% on May 2, 2026, from 135.59T to 131.43T, the sixth decrease this year.
- Public miners sold more than 32,000 BTC in Q1 2026, exceeding their entire 2025 sell-off, to fund a pivot into AI and high-performance computing.
- CoinShares projects up to 70% of public miner revenue could come from AI infrastructure by year-end 2026, up from roughly 30% today.
- Network hashrate sits near 920 EH/s, down from a 2025 peak above 1 ZH/s, with surviving operators capturing both difficulty relief and recovering hashprice near $36.46/PH/day.
Published: May 3, 2026 02:00 UTC
Bitcoin mining difficulty is the network’s self-regulating measure of how hard it is to find a valid block. When fewer machines are running, blocks come slower than the 10-minute target, and the protocol adjusts difficulty downward at the next 2,016-block interval to bring block times back in line. Recent block times have averaged 10.32 minutes, triggering Saturday’s reduction.
Why miners are walking away from Bitcoin
The current run of difficulty drops is not a temporary blip in hashrate. It tracks a structural shift in how publicly traded miners deploy capital. Public Bitcoin miners sold more than 32,000 BTC in the first quarter of 2026, more than they sold in all four quarters of 2025 combined, according to data compiled by CoinShares and corroborated by company filings.
Marathon Digital offloaded roughly 13,000 BTC in March alone, dropping out of the top three corporate Bitcoin holders. Riot Platforms sold 3,778 BTC in Q1 to raise about $289.5 million, with proceeds earmarked for data center build-out. Cango liquidated 2,000 BTC for roughly $143 million to clear Bitcoin-backed debt. Core Scientific unloaded about 1,900 BTC in January to raise $175 million. Bitdeer zeroed out its treasury entirely.
The most direct statement of the pivot came from Bitfarms CEO Ben Gagnon, who told investors the company has cut its holdings from a peak of 3,301 BTC to 1,827 BTC and reframed the business itself: “We are no longer a Bitcoin company.” Bitfarms is repositioning as a high-performance computing host, using mining infrastructure as a bridge into the AI buildout.
The economics behind the pivot
The April 2024 halving cut block rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC, slicing miners’ single largest revenue line in half overnight. With Bitcoin trading around $78,000 on May 2 and hashprice still recovering, operators running anything other than the most efficient hardware are pinned against breakeven.
CoinShares’ Q1 2026 mining report estimates that up to 20% of miners are operating at a loss at current spot prices. To stay cash positive on next-generation machines, operators need electricity below roughly $0.05 per kilowatt-hour. Older rigs are unprofitable across most jurisdictions.
Hashprice, the metric that captures expected daily revenue per petahash of mining power, sits at $36.46 per PH/day as of late April, up about 13.65% over the past 30 days. At that level, an S21 Pro hosted at $0.075/kWh nets roughly $1.69 per day, or about $617 per machine per year. The math gets ugly fast on anything less efficient.
How big is the AI revenue line
The pivot is showing up in contract announcements, not just rhetoric. CoinShares estimates that public miners have announced more than $70 billion in AI and HPC contracts as of Q1 2026, and projects that AI-related revenue could account for up to 70% of public miner revenue by year-end 2026, compared with roughly 30% today.
What miners bring to the AI buildout is not novel hardware, it is interconnected power. Operating Bitcoin mines means owning or leasing sites with substation-level grid access, cooling, and existing relationships with utilities. Those are the bottlenecks for AI training and inference clusters, and Wall Street has been willing to underwrite the conversion. The Block reported in March that the second-largest difficulty drop of 2026 coincided with a wave of miner-to-HPC announcements.
What this means for Bitcoin’s network
A lower difficulty is good news for the miners who stay. Each block is easier to find, energy costs fall per BTC mined, and forced selling pressure from operators meeting payroll eases. The hashrate that has left the network through the AI pivot is not being replaced at the same pace, although CoinShares forecasts a rebound to roughly 1.8 ZH/s by year-end as private operators and overseas hashrate fill the gap.
The longer-term question is what happens to network security if the public miner cohort permanently exits as a category. Bitcoin’s security budget is funded by block rewards plus transaction fees. With rewards halved and the next halving still two years away, the network needs either price appreciation or fee growth to compensate for the structural drift of compute toward AI. Neither is guaranteed.
What comes next
The next difficulty adjustment is roughly two weeks out. If hashrate continues to drift lower, expect another cut. If price holds above $80,000 and forces a hashrate rebound, the trend can reverse quickly. Watch the Q2 2026 earnings cycle for the public miner cohort. Companies that disclose AI contract revenue alongside Bitcoin production will define how analysts price the sector for the rest of the year.
Also worth tracking is the small group of miners doubling down on Bitcoin, including Tether’s open-source Bitcoin mining toolkit MDK, released last week, which targets sovereign and small-scale operators rather than the public companies racing toward AI. The bifurcation between commodity hashrate operators and AI-pivoting hyperscalers is the structural story of 2026 mining.
Frequently asked questions
Why did Bitcoin’s mining difficulty drop on May 2, 2026?
Block times averaged 10.32 minutes during the prior epoch, slower than the 10-minute target, signaling that hashrate had fallen. The protocol automatically reduced difficulty by about 3.07%, from 135.59 trillion to 131.43 trillion, to bring block times back toward 10 minutes.
How much Bitcoin have public miners sold in 2026?
Public Bitcoin mining companies sold more than 32,000 BTC in Q1 2026, exceeding their combined sales for all of 2025. Marathon Digital led with roughly 13,000 BTC sold in March, followed by Riot Platforms at 3,778 BTC and Cango at 2,000 BTC. Bitdeer liquidated its entire treasury.
What share of miner revenue is expected to come from AI by year-end 2026?
CoinShares projects up to 70% of public Bitcoin miner revenue could come from AI and HPC contracts by the end of 2026, up from roughly 30% today. More than $70 billion in AI/HPC contracts have been announced across the public miner cohort.
