Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Records One of Its Largest Declines of 2026

Find out our latest reports, listed below:

• Block Scholes x Panoptic: Bridging The Onchain Convexity Gap

• Volatility Report: February 2026

• 2026 – the year of RWA perps?
  

• Bybit x Block Scholes: “2026: It's Different This Time?”

Market Snapshot: Overnight Moves

Daily Updates:

• After slipping from $70K over the weekend, BTC briefly traded at a two-week low of $68K, before rallying vertically higher — as developments in the Middle East continue to weigh on risk sentiment. 
• Last Friday President Trump had floated the idea of “winding down” military efforts in the Gulf region as the US was “getting very close to meeting our objectives”. 
• Less than a day later, Trump then issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Iran which was due to end Monday evening New York time. 
• On Truth Social he wrote that “If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” 
• Tehran responded quickly with state TV reporting that the country will shut the Strait “completely” if its power facilities are attacked, while the Iranian military will target “all energy, information technology, and desalination infrastructure” linked to the US and Israel in the region. 
• In a manner that has consistently defined his second term, Trump has since quickly reversed his stance, with a post on Truth Social just now citing that the US and Iran have had “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST.”
• As such, Trump has decided to instruct the “DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD”.
• BTC jumped from $69K to over $71K on the news. 

• In options markets, BTC’s term structure of implied volatility remains inverted after 7-day ATM implied volatility rose more than 10 percentage points to 61%. That occurred as the demand for put options pushed the 25-delta put-call skew for short-dated contracts from -4% to -12% — also a two-week low. 
• ETH’s term structure of volatility on the other hand is more flat, with IV levels across maturities trading between 75-76%. Put-call skew is less bearish in ETH options than in BTC, with 7-day put-call skew currently at -9%. 

• With Brent crude oil prices up 50% since the conflict began, sentiment in US equities has continued to worsen. 
• On Friday, all three major US equity benchmarks closed lower. The S&P 500 fell 1.51% to its lowest since September, the Nasdaq-100 finished 1.88% lower, while the Dow Jones dropped by 0.96%. 
• The decline in equities also occurred alongside a concurrent selloff in bonds and US treasuries. 
• The yield on the 10-year US treasury is up nearly 20bps over the past five days, its highest since July 2025, while the 2-year yield is up close to 30bps over the same period. 
• Even traditional safe-haven assets have been hit — gold has wiped out all of its year-to-date gains after falling for a ninth day and posted its biggest weekly decline since 1983 last Friday. Meanwhile, over the past five days, silver prices have plummeted more than 20% too. 

• Bitcoin’s mining difficulty fell by 7.76% on Saturday to 133.79T, marking one of the sharpest downward adjustments this year.
• According to data from CloverPool and CoinWarz, it is the second-largest decline of 2026, behind only the 11.16% drop recorded on 7 February.
• The adjustment was triggered after average block times rose to around 12 minutes and 36 seconds in the previous period, well above Bitcoin’s 10-minute target. 

• Brazil is expected to delay plans for new crypto tax rules after newly appointed Finance Minister Dario Durigan reportedly decided not to move forward with a public consultation.
• The government is instead focusing on the presidential election in October and appears reluctant to push controversial tax measures during the campaign period.
• This means an important part of Brazil’s crypto policy framework, particularly around the taxation of stablecoin-related activity, will likely remain unresolved for now.
• Although the central bank has already introduced rules for crypto service providers and placed more oversight on stablecoin transactions, broader tax reform now seems likely to be postponed until after the election.

• NYSE Arca and NYSE American have become the final major U.S. exchanges to drop the 25,000-contract cap on spot BTC and ETH ETF options, bringing crypto ETF options into line with the treatment of other commodity-based ETF options across all major U.S. exchanges.
• With the SEC waiving the standard waiting period, the changes took effect immediately and also allowed these products to trade as FLEX options (Flexible Exchange Options).
• Separately, Nasdaq ISE is still seeking approval to raise IBIT-specific position limits to 1M contracts. 

• In a Friday letter to the SEC’s Crypto Task Force, Fidelity urged the regulator to accelerate the integration of crypto assets into existing market structures, with a particular focus on alternative trading systems and tokenized securities.
• The firm backed the SEC’s broader efforts to modernise legacy frameworks for digital assets, while stressing that investor protection, transparency and market integrity must remain at the core of any new rules.
• Fidelity called for clearer guidance for broker-dealers on custody, trading and crypto-security pairs, and urged the SEC to establish bright-line standards for secondary trading in tokenized securities issued by third parties.
• It also argued that tokenized versions of traditional securities should generally retain the same regulatory treatment as their underlying assets, helping to reduce fragmentation between on-chain and traditional markets.

• Grayscale has filed to launch a HYPE ETF on Friday, offering public market exposure to Hyperliquid’s native token.
• The proposed fund, which would trade on Nasdaq under the ticker GHYP if approved, would track HYPE using CoinDesk benchmark data and custody assets with Coinbase Custody.
• However, staking is not currently permitted under the structure.

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