Bitcoin difficulty fell 11.16% in its biggest cut since 2021

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty fell 11.16% at block 935,424 on February 7, 2026, the network’s largest downward adjustment since July 2021. The retarget reduced difficulty from approximately 141.67 trillion to 125.86 trillion after blocks in the preceding adjustment period arrived more slowly than Bitcoin’s protocol target.

The development mattered because difficulty measures how much proof-of-work miners must perform, on average, to produce an acceptable block. A reduction of this size provided immediate mechanical relief to the computing capacity that remained online, while also documenting how sharply active mining power had contracted during the preceding epoch.

What the blockchain recorded

Mempool’s block record identifies block 935,424 by the hash `00000000000000000001f7e8843ba6c103a3577503db97544a9b26072a0acb54`. Its timestamp was 13:56:45 UTC on February 7, and its compact difficulty target was encoded as `0x17023c7e`. The corresponding network difficulty was approximately 125,864,590,119,494.

The prior difficulty was approximately 141,668,107,417,558. Calculating the percentage change as the new value divided by the old value, minus one, produces a decline of 11.1553%, which rounds to 11.16%. The percentage is therefore a calculation from recorded difficulty values, not an estimate of bitcoin’s price, miner revenue or electricity consumption.

Bitcoin Core applies the main-network retarget only at difficulty-adjustment intervals. The implementation looks back across what is intended to represent 14 days of blocks and changes the proof-of-work target according to the observed timespan, subject to protocol limits. At block 935,424, that deterministic mechanism made subsequent blocks easier to mine than blocks in the preceding epoch.

Why difficulty moved lower

Contemporaneous reporting placed average block time before the adjustment at roughly 11.4 minutes, above Bitcoin’s intended ten-minute interval. Slower blocks imply that less effective hashpower was competing than the existing difficulty anticipated, although short-window hashrate figures are estimates inferred from block production rather than direct measurements of every mining machine.

The Block linked the contraction to two overlapping pressures known by February 7: deteriorating mining economics during bitcoin’s market decline and storm-related curtailment by North American miners. ERCOT had warned in January that Winter Storm Fern created a significant risk of emergency conditions in Texas, a major mining jurisdiction. Those facts support curtailment as a contributor, but the event-day record cannot assign a precise share of the global hashrate reduction to weather, commercial shutdowns, maintenance or other causes.

Difficulty does not measure the number of miners, their geographic distribution or the network’s aggregate electricity use. Nor did the 11.16% reduction mean Bitcoin’s proof-of-work rules had failed. It showed the retarget mechanism responding to a completed 2,016-block measurement window.

The economic and institutional significance

For miners that stayed online, lower difficulty increased the expected share of block rewards obtainable from a fixed amount of hashpower, all else equal. Whether that improved profitability depended separately on bitcoin’s price, transaction fees, machine efficiency, energy expense and curtailment payments. The adjustment therefore offered relative relief rather than proof that every operator had become profitable.

The size of the move was the central signal. Contemporaneous analysis identified it as the largest negative adjustment since China’s 2021 mining restrictions disrupted a substantial concentration of global hashpower. Unlike a company forecast or survey, the February 7 retarget was enforced by validating nodes and visible in the shared blockchain record.

Later context

Luxor’s March 6 review confirmed that the February 7 decrease was the largest single-epoch reduction since July 2021 and ranked it seventh among declines in the modern ASIC era under Luxor’s methodology. That later ranking clarifies the historical scale; it was not part of the blockchain result itself and does not change what was verifiable on February 7.