On-chain data reveals the Bitcoin network is undergoing a significant and sustained period of miner capitulation, marked by a consistent decline in mining difficulty since November 2025. The network's difficulty, which hit an all-time high of nearly 155 Tera (T) in early November, has since crashed to approximately 141.67 T by late January 2026. This stepped decline confirms a massive exodus of hashrate from the network as miners unplug machines en masse.
The primary driver is a collapse in profitability, or "hashprice." In late October 2025, hashprice plummeted from around $49 per petahash per second (PH/s) to roughly $35/PH/s. Despite the falling difficulty—which should theoretically make mining more profitable for those who remain—profitability has remained stagnant in the $38–$40 range, creating a "profitability trap." This environment has forced many operators to shut down or repurpose their infrastructure, with a notable shift towards leasing power capacity to AI data centers via high-performance computing (HPC) contracts, which offer guaranteed profits compared to mining at a loss.
Analysts are watching the Hash Ribbon metric, which tracks the 30-day and 60-day moving averages of Bitcoin's hashrate. Capitulation is signaled when the short-term average falls below the long-term average. The metric last indicated capitulation in late November 2025, coinciding with a Bitcoin price low around $80,000. The current total network hashrate has fallen roughly 20%, from about 1.2 zettahashes per second (ZH/s) to around 950 exahashes per second (EH/s).
This hashrate drop is projected to trigger the network's largest difficulty adjustment since July 2021—a decline of about 17%. Historically, periods of miner capitulation and subsequent normalization of the Hash Ribbon have preceded significant Bitcoin price rebounds, as seen in 2024 and post-FTX collapse in 2022. The key question now is whether this pattern will repeat, potentially marking a bottom and the start of a new expansionary phase for BTC.
