Update (2-7-2026): This article has been updated with the latest projection for the next Bitcoin difficulty adjustment.
Bitcoin’s mining difficulty— the protocol parameter that regulates how hard it is to add a new block to the blockchain—fell about 11.16% in a single adjustment, the biggest single decline since China’s 2021 mining ban. Difficulty is now 125.86 T, and the adjustment took effect at block 935,429, according to CoinWarz. Average block time is roughly 9.47 minutes, slightly under the 10-minute target.
CoinWarz projects difficulty will rebound by roughly 5.63% to about 132.96 T at the next adjustment, currently estimated for Feb. 20.
The drop follows a sharp downturn across crypto markets that erased more than half of Bitcoin’s value from an all-time high above $125,000 to roughly $60,000, and it coincided with operational disruptions from a severe U.S. winter storm.
Winter Storm Fern, which affected 34 states with snow, ice and extreme cold, disrupted power infrastructure and forced many miners to throttle down or halt operations temporarily. Those outages reduced total network hashrate and contributed to the steep difficulty decline.
Foundry USA, the largest mining pool by reported hashrate, briefly lost about 60% of its hashing power during the storm, dropping from nearly 400 EH/s to roughly 198 EH/s. At the time of writing, Foundry’s hashrate had recovered to over 354 EH/s and it represented roughly 29.47% of the network, per Hashrate Index data.
Overall network hashrate slid to a four-month low in January amid worsening market conditions and an ongoing trend of some operators reallocating mining capacity to AI data centers and other high-performance computing applications.
For historical context, China’s May 2021 ban and subsequent crackdown on mining caused a series of steep downward adjustments between May and July 2021, with declines ranging from about 12.6% to 27.9%, according to CoinWarz’s historical data.
This report was produced following independent editorial standards. Readers are encouraged to verify figures and projections independently.