$BTC ‌

#BitcoinMiningIndustryUpdates
April 5, 2026. Bitcoin is sitting at roughly $67,040 as I write this, essentially flat on the day with a 24-hour range between $66,610 and $67,547
On the surface that looks boring. But I want you to understand what is happening beneath that surface, because the mining industry specifically is going through one of the most significant structural shifts I have seen since the 2020 halving cycle, and if you are involved in this space in any capacity, whether as a miner, an investor in mining stocks, or simply someone who holds Bitcoin and cares about network security, then you need to be paying close attention right now.

Let me start with where we are technically on price, because mining economics and spot price are inseparably linked. Bitcoin is in a confirmed downtrend on the 4-hour and daily moving average structure. MA7 is sitting below MA30, which is sitting below MA120, on both the 4-hour and daily timeframes. That is textbook bearish alignment. We are also 28.5 percent below where we were just 90 days ago, and down about 33 percent from our recent highs on the 30-day reading. The market did print what looks like a MACD bottom divergence on the daily chart, meaning price made a lower low but the MACD histogram is rising, which is a signal I take seriously as a possible early reversal setup. The SAR indicator on the daily and 4-hour is still below price, technically keeping multi-day bulls in the picture on those longer frames. But the 15-minute is screaming overbought right now with CCI at 140 and Williams Percent Range near the top of its range, which tells me short-term sellers are likely lurking near current levels. My honest read is that Bitcoin is building a base somewhere between $65,000 and $68,500 and we may remain trapped in this range for another two to four weeks before any meaningful directional break. I am not calling a bottom, I am saying the data is mixed enough to warrant patience.

Now let us talk about what is actually happening in the mining industry because this is the more important story today.

Network hashrate hit all-time highs in 2025, touching approximately 1,160 exahashes per second at its peak. That was a direct product of the bull market, cheap capital flowing into mining hardware, and the post-halving competitive pressure forcing miners to upgrade or die. But something changed heading into early 2026. We just recorded the first quarterly drop in network hashrate in six years. Q1 2026 saw hashrate fall roughly four percent from year-end levels, settling down to somewhere in the 990 to 1,020 exahashes range by the end of March. That is not catastrophic by any measure, but it is meaningful.

What caused it? Two things primarily. First, the AI and high-performance computing pivot. Public miners like Core Scientific, IREN, Riot Platforms, and several others have been signing HPC and AI infrastructure contracts worth collectively around $70 billion. These are miners who own the land, the power infrastructure, and the operational expertise to run large-scale compute, and they are pointing that capacity at AI workloads because the margins are better right now than Bitcoin mining at $67,000 per coin. When your all-in mining cost is hovering between $80,000 and $87,000 per Bitcoin depending on your energy rate and hardware efficiency, and spot is at $67,000, you are losing money on every coin you produce. That is not a sustainable position. The AI pivot is not a trend, it is a survival mechanism for firms that cannot get their cost basis below spot.

The second factor is energy cost pressure. Industrial-scale operations need to be sub-$0.04 per kilowatt-hour to remain profitable in this environment. That threshold is getting harder to meet globally. Oil above $100 per barrel is feeding through to electricity costs in regions where miners depend on fossil-fuel-generated power. Operations in Iran, which at one point represented roughly four to seven percent of global hashrate, have been disrupted. The US, China, and Russia still collectively control around 68 percent of global mining power, but the margins in all three of those regions are under pressure for different reasons.

There was also a notable difficulty adjustment story over the past few weeks. Mining difficulty dropped 7.76 percent in late March, falling to around 133.79 trillion, as some miners capitulated or redirected capacity. Then it rebounded approximately 3.9 percent to about 138.97 trillion as more efficient operations filled the vacuum. This is exactly how the network is supposed to self-regulate, and honestly it is one of the most elegant mechanisms in all of finance. When weak hands exit, difficulty drops, rewards-per-hash improve for survivors, and the network rebalances. I have watched this play out across multiple cycles and it never gets old.

On the revenue side, I want to be direct with you about something that gets glossed over in most mining commentary. Block subsidies still make up roughly 99.4 percent of miner revenue. Transaction fees represent about 0.6 percent, or around $63 million annually at current rates. This is a problem that the industry has not solved yet. In 2028 we face another halving, which will cut the block subsidy in half again. If fee revenue does not grow significantly by then, the economics for smaller and mid-tier miners get extremely difficult. The major firms like CleanSpark that have been quietly upgrading their hardware to 13.5 joules per terahash are positioning themselves to survive that transition. The ones who have not will face an extremely brutal 2028 and 2029.

MARA Holdings took $1.7 billion in write-downs recently and multiple large miners have been selling from their treasury reserves to cover operational costs. That is capitulation behavior, and in my experience watching this industry, sustained capitulation among miners tends to precede price appreciation by roughly three to six months, not because it is a guarantee, but because the forced selling pressure eventually exhausts itself and the market absorbs it.

Now let me share what I am actually watching and what I think about all of this personally.

The news out of MetaPlanet this week is genuinely significant. They purchased 5,075 Bitcoin in Q1 2026, bringing their total holdings to 40,177 BTC, which now makes them the third-largest corporate Bitcoin holder globally, surpassing MARA Holdings. They raised $255 million to do it and they are targeting 100,000 BTC by year end. When a Japanese publicly listed company is committing that aggressively to a Bitcoin treasury strategy during a period of price suppression, that is not speculation, that is conviction buying from people with access to serious institutional analysis.

The Charles Schwab news is even bigger from a structural standpoint. A $12 trillion brokerage firm is preparing to launch direct Bitcoin and Ethereum trading for retail customers in 2026. I cannot overstate what this means for the long-term demand side of this equation. Every time a major traditional financial institution opens a direct access channel to Bitcoin, it meaningfully expands the total addressable investor base. This is not the same as an ETF sitting inside a brokerage account. Direct trading means direct custody familiarity, direct price exposure, and eventually direct integration with traditional portfolio management tools.

Michael Saylor made a statement this week that I found worth noting. He declared that the four-year Bitcoin cycle is effectively dead, arguing that price is now driven by capital flows from banks and institutional credit rather than retail-driven halving speculation. I have mixed feelings about this view. On one hand, he is not wrong that institutional capital has fundamentally changed the structure of Bitcoin's demand side. On the other hand, cycles are ultimately about human psychology and capital allocation timing, and those things do not disappear just because Goldman Sachs now owns a Bitcoin desk. I think the cycles will still exist, they will just be longer, shallower, and more correlated with macro credit conditions than they were in 2017 or 2021.

The fear and greed index right now is at 12, which is extreme fear territory. Social sentiment is 56 percent positive and 30 percent negative, which is healthier than the index might suggest, but social discussion volume dropped 79 percent over the last three days compared to the prior window. That kind of sudden silence in social chatter usually means one of two things: either the market is in genuine disinterest mode and range trading continues, or a breakout is quietly loading without much retail attention. Given everything I described above, I lean toward the second interpretation, but I am not positioning aggressively on that belief alone.

My personal advice for anyone in or adjacent to the mining industry right now is this. If you are a small-scale solo miner and you are still running older-generation ASICs above the $0.06 per kilowatt-hour energy rate threshold, you need to have a very honest conversation with yourself about whether you are mining out of conviction or out of sunk cost fallacy. The economics for inefficient operations are not going to improve materially until price climbs back above $80,000 to $85,000. That may happen, and I believe it eventually will, but it may not happen this quarter or next.

If you are investing in publicly listed mining companies, the ones who are successfully executing the AI infrastructure pivot while maintaining meaningful Bitcoin production are the most interesting to me right now. Pure-play Bitcoin miners with no HPC diversification and average production costs above spot are essentially leveraged bets on price recovery. That is fine if that is what you want, but go in clear-eyed about the risk.

For long-term Bitcoin holders, the on-chain picture of large anonymous transfers totaling over $2 billion flowing into major exchanges and institutional desks in the first week of April is worth monitoring. Large flows into exchanges can mean selling pressure, but they can also mean institutional repositioning ahead of an anticipated move. With Schwab coming, with MetaPlanet accumulating, and with the MACD bottom divergence visible on the daily chart, I am personally not selling into this weakness. I am watching, I am patient, and I am prepared to add if we see a decisive flush below $65,000 that does not hold.

The mining industry is not dying. It is maturing, consolidating, and evolving. The weak operators are leaving or pivoting, the strong ones are upgrading and diversifying, and the network itself continues to function with near-perfect reliability regardless of what the price does. That underlying resilience is, in my view, precisely why Bitcoin at $67,000 with a fear index of 12 and institutional buyers still accumulating is more interesting than most people realize right now.

Stay patient, manage your risk, and do not let short-term price action distract you from what the fundamentals are telling you.