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The bitcoin hashrate, the total computational power that is securing the network, fell during the first quarter of six years for the most part. Currently it is down about 4% year to date, at around 1 zettahash per second (ZH/s) and its current position as the lowest-ranking .
In the last five years, Glassnode data shows that rate has increased from about 100 exahashes per second (EH/s), a 10-fold increase. During the first quarter, each year it was an annual increase in the metric that ended with strong full-year growth of over 10% for all years. The figure nearly tripled the number in 2022, when it was almost .
The AI Pivot
In 2026, the shift reflects changing economics across bitcoin mining industry. margins are negative, with production costs near $90,000 per bitcoin and the spot price closer to $67,000. The public listing of miners is reversing, with returns higher and more predictable than expected, by artificial intelligence and high-performance computing infrastructure in response to the rises that are seen as an important part of many publicly listed miner.
This transition is being funded by debt issuance and bitcoin sales, which reduces the investment into bitcoin mining. This means that Hashrate growth is becoming more sensitive to the price of the cryptocurrency, with weaker prices most likely to cause further declines as smaller operators leave.
Although a collapsed hashrate may raise concerns about network security, decentralization could be more important than absolute size. Listed U in public as . A , S. More than 40% of the global hash rate have been attributed to miners, and an increase in their power could lead to a more geographically distributed network. This shift may ultimately favor decentralization in that sense, as it is argued by the current shift of .
While it is a slow down, CoinShares still predicts that hashrate growth will reach around 1 in the near future. At end of 2026, conditional on bitcoin recovering toward $100,000 with 8 ZH/s.
Read More : End of bitcoin ‘HODL’: public miners going all-in on AI, signaling more BTC selling
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