Twelve months after the April 2024 halving cut block rewards to 3.125 BTC, the miner capitulation that analysts were bracing for never arrived at scale. Hash rate is sitting near all-time highs above 800 exahashes per second as of mid-2026, and publicly traded miners like Marathon Digital and Riot Platforms have largely maintained operations rather than selling off equipment or shutting down facilities.
The standard post-halving script runs like this: reward compression forces out marginal miners, hash rate drops, difficulty adjusts downward, survivors capture a larger share of a smaller pie. That happened after the 2020 halving. This time, the script has been slower to play out - and two factors explain most of the divergence.
Transaction Fee Revenue Has Filled Some of the Gap
The Runes protocol, which launched on the same block as the halving in April 2024, created a sustained secondary fee market on Bitcoin that didn’t exist in previous cycles. In the weeks immediately following the halving, transaction fees at times exceeded block subsidy revenue. That compression has eased, but average fees have remained meaningfully higher than the pre-Runes baseline. Miners are no longer entirely dependent on subsidy income to cover operating costs - a structural shift that wasn’t true in 2020 or 2016.
This doesn’t mean Runes solved miner economics permanently. Fee revenue is volatile and tied to speculative activity that can dry up quickly.
Energy Costs Are the Real Differentiator
The miners that are thriving aren’t necessarily running the newest ASICs - they’re the ones who locked in long-term power purchase agreements at sub-4 cent per kilowatt-hour rates before electricity markets tightened. Operations in Paraguay, parts of Texas, and certain regions of the Middle East have a structural cost floor that makes 3.125 BTC per block viable even at price levels well below current market.
The miners squeezed out since the halving have predominantly been mid-tier operations using older generation hardware - S19-era machines - at higher energy costs. Their exit has been gradual rather than the sudden capitulation events seen in mid-2022.
What the Hash Rate Tells You
Persistent hash rate growth after a halving is a signal that enough miners believe the current Bitcoin price more than compensates for the reduced subsidy. At current prices above $100,000, that math still works for efficient operators. The question heading into late 2026 is whether price holds if macro conditions deteriorate - because the fee market alone cannot carry miner revenue if block space demand softens at the same time.