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Bitcoin mining a year after the 2024 halving: who's still standing

@blockonomist | 2026-05-16 14:32:29 |

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The April 2024 halving dropped block rewards from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC. A year later, the mining industry looks different than many predicted.

The miners who survived: large-scale operations with very low electricity costs (under $0.04/kWh), access to efficient next-gen ASICs (Antminer S21, Whatsminer M60 series), and diversified revenue (some pivoted to HPC/AI compute hosting in the same data centers). The hashrate actually increased post-halving rather than declining, which surprised some analysts — efficient miners expanded while inefficient ones exited.

The miners who struggled: small-to-medium operations locked into older hardware and higher electricity contracts that couldn't absorb the revenue cut. The consolidation trend toward industrial-scale operations accelerated.

Transaction fees saved some of those margins during high-activity periods (Ordinals, Runes protocol launches generated fee spikes), but fees remain too volatile to depend on as a base revenue source. The long-term fee market question — what happens when block rewards eventually approach zero — hasn't been resolved.

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