The State of Bitcoin Mining, H1 2026: Hashrate, Efficiency, Pool Centralization & Economics

D-Central Research · Edition H1 2026 · data as of 2026-06-19 (block 954,388) · CC BY 4.0

1. The network: ~929 EH/s and climbing toward 2028

Bitcoin's network hashrate sat near 929 EH/s in mid-2026, with mining difficulty around 124.9 trillion. The current difficulty epoch and the running difficulty series both show the long secular climb continuing despite price volatility — security spend tracks hashprice with a lag, not lockstep. The next halving is roughly 95,600 blocks away (~April 2028), when the block subsidy steps from 3.125 to 1.5625 BTC. The mempool fee market was quiet, with next-block fees around 2 sat/vB, meaning subsidy still dominates miner revenue.

Live data: Network Vitals · Difficulty History (459 epochs) · Halving Schedule.

2. Hardware: efficiency roughly doubled in four years

The efficiency frontier — the miners no smaller-or-equal machine beats on J/TH — is led by hydro-cooled S23-class hardware at about 9.5 J/TH (Antminer S23 Hyd), with the S21 XP+ Hydro near 11 J/TH. For context, a 2022-era S19 Pro runs ~29.5 J/TH and a stock S21 ~17.5 J/TH. Put plainly: the newest flagships are nearly twice as efficient as a four-year-old machine, which is exactly why older hardware is curtailed first when power prices rise. Of 251 SHA-256 models tracked, only 14 sit on the frontier; everything else is dominated by something both faster and leaner.

Live data: Efficiency Frontier · ASIC Spec Database · Profitability Leaderboard.

3. Decentralization: the Nakamoto coefficient is still 3

The open structural risk in Bitcoin mining is not energy — it is pool concentration. Over the trailing month, the Nakamoto coefficient was just 3: only three pools were needed to exceed half of all blocks, with Foundry USA alone at ~27% and an HHI concentration index near 1,492 (the lower-moderate band). Block-template decentralization — Stratum V2 job declaration and OCEAN's DATUM — is the structural fix that raises the coefficient without changing who owns the hashrate, by moving template construction from the pool to the miner.

Live data: Pool Centralization Tracker · Mining Pool Database · Stratum Support Matrix.

4. Economics: hashprice and the marginal miner

Mid-2026 hashprice ran near $31.72 USD / $44.87 CAD per PH/day (fee-inclusive) at a BTC price around $88,563 CAD. At that hashprice, a miner's break-even electricity cost is set almost entirely by efficiency: a 9.5 J/TH machine tolerates roughly double the power price of a 19 J/TH one before going cash-negative. This is the lever behind every siting decision — stranded energy, behind-the-meter deals, demand response and heat reuse all exist to push the marginal miner's effective power cost down.

Live data: Bitcoin Hashprice (live) · Cost to Mine 1 BTC · Canadian Electricity Rates.

Methodology & data

Every figure in this report is a point-in-time read of a D-Central open dataset (CC BY 4.0). Network, difficulty and hashprice figures derive from public APIs (mempool.space, CoinGecko); hardware and decentralization figures from D-Central's own spec, efficiency and pool datasets. This is a frozen snapshot — for current values, follow the linked live datasets, or browse the full Open Mining Data hub (39 datasets) and its machine-readable catalog.

Cite this report

Free to quote and share under CC BY 4.0 — please credit D-Central and link back.

D-Central Technologies. "The State of Bitcoin Mining, H1 2026." d-central.tech, 2026-06-19. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://d-central.tech/reports/state-of-bitcoin-mining-2026-h1/