Bitcoin Hashrate Drought Enters Record-Breaking 316-Day Stretch

Bitcoin's hashrate has spent 316 days below its record high, marking the longest drought in over a decade. According to Blockchain.com data, the seven-day network average stood at around 914 exahashes per second (EH/s) on August 31, about 20.6% below its October 2025 peak of 1,151.6 EH/s.

Twenty One Capital CEO Raphael Zagury has described this period as Bitcoin's first sustained 'economic hashrate bear market.' The decline in hashrate is attributed to weak mining economics, summer power curtailments, and a growing shift by some miners toward artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing.

Bitcoin's price recovery, which saw it rally 34.9% from late June to late August, reaching as high as above $81,000, has not brought enough machines back online. Historically, higher Bitcoin prices have increased the dollar value of block rewards, encouraging miners to restart machines that became uneconomic during a downturn.

However, this time, some of the power and data-center capacity leaving Bitcoin now has somewhere else to go. The shift toward AI is significant because it changes what happens after a miner switches off their machines. IREN, for example, decommissioned miners and redirected power and data-center infrastructure toward AI Cloud Services.

The next phase of Bitcoin's hashrate recovery will show how much capacity was merely idle and how much has effectively moved on. Some miners are still expanding aggressively, but the industry is split between those adding Bitcoin machines, diverting infrastructure toward computing customers, and companies trying to pursue both.