Highlights

  • Listed miners' weighted average cash cost hit $75,500/BTC in Q2 2026, versus a quarter-end Bitcoin price of $58,400
  • MARA lost roughly $15,800 per coin mined at scale; CIFR's cost ran past $215,000/BTC
  • Monthly hash price bottomed at $27.7/PH/s/day in June, down from about $63 at its July 2025 peak
  • ABTC, BTDR, HIVE and IREN stayed cash-profitable; CLSK and RIOT hovered near flat

The listed Bitcoin mining sector slipped into aggregate cash losses during the second quarter of 2026, according to CoinShares' latest mining report. The weighted average pre-tax cash cost to produce one coin climbed to roughly $75,500, while Bitcoin itself closed the quarter near $58,400 — a gap wide enough to push the sector as a whole below breakeven for the first time in this cycle.

The pain was not evenly distributed. Four operators — ABTC, BTDR, HIVE and IREN — stayed cash-profitable, with realized revenue per coin still running above their production costs in the low-$60,000-to-$65,000 range. CleanSpark (CLSK) and Riot (RIOT) landed almost exactly at the line, with costs and realized revenue separated by only a few hundred dollars per BTC.

Further down the cost curve, the numbers turn ugly. MARA's cash cost reached $86,126 per BTC against realized revenue of $70,315, a loss of roughly $15,800 on every coin mined at scale. Core Scientific (CORZ) came in at $105,821/BTC, TeraWulf (WULF) at $174,683/BTC, and Cipher Mining (CIFR) at an outlier $215,723/BTC — figures that leave little room for those miners to cover costs from block rewards and fees alone at current prices.

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Underpinning the squeeze is a collapse in hash price, the standard measure of daily mining revenue per unit of computing power. CoinShares found the monthly average bottomed at $27.7 per petahash per second per day in June, down from roughly $63 at its July 2025 peak — a decline of more than 55% in less than a year. That drop reflects both a still-climbing global hashrate competing for a fixed block subsidy and a Bitcoin price that has failed to keep pace with rising network difficulty.

The breakeven breach helps explain why some public miners have been cutting hashrate to chase AI cloud-computing contracts instead, converting energized capacity that no longer pencils out for mining into steadier, dollar-denominated compute revenue. Firms like CORZ and WULF have leaned hardest into that pivot, and their cash-cost figures in the CoinShares data suggest why: mining at current prices and difficulty is a losing trade for anyone without the cheapest power or newest fleets.

For miners still running at a loss, the path back to profitability runs through either a Bitcoin price recovery well above $75,500 or a meaningful drop in network difficulty as unprofitable hashrate switches off — the self-correcting mechanism that has ended past mining squeezes. Until one of those happens, treasury balances and equity or debt raises are what keep the weakest operators' rigs spinning. Some analysts argue the pressure is already peaking; one recent read on Bitcoin's price action puts a floor near $72,000-$74,000, which would still leave several of the highest-cost miners underwater even if it holds.