Bitcoin has traded below the estimated price to mine for five straight months, according to analysts at JPMorgan, leaving nearly one in five miners unprofitable and pushing public officials to sell the portfolio.
In a note to clients published this week, analysts led by managing director Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou said the bitcoin mining economy will “expand significantly” in 2026. JPMorgan place The current price of bitcoin is about $78,000, a figure that comes from electricity, hardware depreciation, and mining costs.
It’s a bitcoin transaction nearby $63,000, the difference between the spot price and the breakeven has resulted in a constant squeeze throughout the sector.
One of the most prominent of JPMorgan’s flagship products is the systematic change in how the Bitcoin network responds to price movements. The beta of mining difficulty to BTC prices – a measure of how difficult it is to move in price – has increased to 0.62 over the past six months. This figure shows a network where most miners live at or near their price, turning machines on or off as prices change rather than working consistently.
The pattern began to show at the beginning of June, when the mining problem fell by 10.09%, its second biggest drop of the year. Bitcoin hash rate he has fallen 12% in June, according to Galaxy Research. A similar 10% challenge occurred in January, putting two levels of the scale within one calendar year.
The financial crisis pushed the miners into a corner. Contributors including MARA, CleanSpark, Riot Platforms, Cango, Core Scientific, and Bitdeer sold 32,000 bitcoins in Q1 2026 alone to fund operations, according to data from TheEnergyMag cited in the JPMorgan report. This figure surpasses the total sales of the bitcoin industry for the entire year of 2025, and sets a new quarterly record – surpassing the amount of 20,000 bitcoin that occurred in Q2 2022, in the bear market that followed the collapse of Terra-Luna.
Hashprice, a metric which costs mining money per unit of computing power, is about $33 per petahash per second per day, according to the Hashrate Index. That rate puts nearly 20% of the world’s mining companies in the unprofitable sector, according to CoinShares’ Q1 2026 Bitcoin Mining Report, which JPMorgan cited in its analysis.
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Despite the dire situation, JPMorgan’s analysts stopped short of thinking. The group noted that this type of weak market sentiment, in previous years, acted as a signal against future price appreciation.
He expects the high hashrate sensitivity and high difficulty changes to continue as long as BTC remains below its production cost.
Some support among high-cost workers is possible in the first half of 2026 without reimbursing the cost of goods. Miners collectively held about 1.8 million bitcoin at the time of publication, down from 1.86 million at the end of 2023, a sign that Treasury drawdowns are a current phenomenon.
