Bitcoin miners may find cause for optimism in the coming weeks as the power requirements to mine blocks have diminished by 7.8% over the weekend. Data from Coinwarz indicates that Bitcoin’s mining difficulty plummeted from 83.6 terahash per second (TH/s) to 79.50 TH/s on June 5, a level last seen in March, shortly before the April halving event. A terahash represents the number of hashes—or digital guesses for calculations—that a mining device, pool, or network can generate per second.

Mining difficulty undergoes biweekly adjustments, which can either increase or decrease, based on Bitcoin’s inherent protocol designed to regulate the pace of block generation, ensuring miners are neither too fast nor too slow.

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This recent drop is one of the largest since the FTX exchange collapse in 2022, which caused Bitcoin prices to plunge over 10% in a week, according to analysts at CryptoQuant. “The network hashrate has experienced a 7.8% drawdown, comparable to the aftermath of the FTX collapse in December 2022,” stated Julio Moreno, CryptoQuant’s head of research, in a message to CoinDesk via Telegram. “Miners’ profitability has taken a hit, with daily revenues falling from $78 million pre-halving to $26 million currently.”

Moreno further noted, “Mining difficulty has been on a decline since early May, following a reduction in network hashrate as some miners turned off their equipment due to lower profitability.”

Downward adjustments in mining difficulty result in a proportional decrease in the network’s hashing power, or the total computational power available on the Bitcoin network. This reduction can benefit smaller miners, offering profitable opportunities for mining farms that previously couldn’t sustain operations due to high costs.