Bitcoin Records Largest Difficulty Drop Since China’s 2021 Mining Ban

The Bitcoin network implemented an 11.16% downward difficulty adjustment, reducing mining difficulty from about 141.67 trillion to 125.86 trillion at block 935,429, marking the largest single negative adjustment since China's 2021 mining ban ^[1][2][5].

On-chain reports and network explorers ranked the decline among the top ten largest difficulty drops in Bitcoin history and noted it followed an estimated ~20% fall in network hashrate; some providers reported concentrated outages — for example, Foundry USA lost roughly 60% of its hashrate during a storm — while reported hashprice hit a record low near $33.31 per petahash ^[1][2].

Observers placed the February 2026 adjustment alongside prior major contractions tied to extreme events (the June 2025 heatwave and the December 2022 bear market) and described it as the most severe drop outside of regulatory shock events such as the 2021 China crackdown ^[1][5][6].

The difficulty reset reflects a sudden hashrate contraction that reduced network difficulty and coincided with weak mining economics, according to on-chain reports and industry updates ^[1][2].