The math has turned against bitcoin miners, and the war is making it worse every week.

Checkonchain’s difficulty regression model, which estimates average production costs based on network difficulty and energy inputs, pegged the figure at $88,000 per bitcoin as of March 13.

Bitcoin is trading at $69,200 as on Sunday morning, creating a gap of nearly $19,000 per coin and meaning the average miner is operating at a 21% loss on every block produced.

The cost squeeze has been building since October’s crash took bitcoin from $126,000 to below $70,000, but the Iran war accelerated it. Oil above $100 feeds directly into electricity costs for mining operations, particularly the estimated 8-10% of global hashrate operating in energy markets sensitive to Middle Eastern supply.

The Strait of Hormuz, which handles roughly 20% of the world’s oil and gas flows, remains effectively closed to most commercial traffic. And Trump’s 48-hour ultimatum on Saturday threatening to attack Iran’s power plants added a new layer of risk for miners.

The network is already showing the stress. Difficulty dropped 7.76% on Saturday to 133.79 trillion, the second-largest negative adjustment of 2026 after February’s 11.16% plunge during Winter Storm Fern. Difficulty is now nearly 10% below where it started the year and far below November 2025’s all-time high near 155 trillion.

The hashrate has retreated to roughly 920 EH/s, well below the record 1 zetahash level reached in 2025. Average block times during the last epoch stretched to 12 minutes and 36 seconds, well above the 10-minute target.

Hashprice, the metric tracking expected miner revenue per unit of computing power, is hovering around $33.30 per petahash per second per day according to Luxor’s Hashrate Index. That’s near breakeven for most hardware and not far from the all-time low of $28 hit on Feb. 23.

When miners can’t cover costs, they sell bitcoin to fund operations. That selling adds supply pressure to a market already dealing with 43% of total supply sitting at a loss, whales distributing into rallies, and leveraged positioning dominating price action. Mining economics aren’t just a sector story. They’re a market structure story.

The publicly traded miners have been adapting by diversifying into AI and high-performance computing, which offer more predictable revenue than mining bitcoin at a loss. Marathon Digital, Cipher Mining, and others have been building out data center capacity alongside their mining operations.

The next difficulty adjustment is projected for early April and is expected to decline further according to CoinWarz data. If bitcoin stays below $88,000, and there’s no sign of a return to that level in the near term, the miner exodus continues and difficulty keeps falling.

The network self-corrects by design, making it cheaper to mine as participants leave. But the period between when costs exceed revenue and when difficulty adjusts low enough to restore profitability is where the damage happens, both to miners and to the spot market absorbing their forced selling.

TLDR:

• Founders Fund is set to lead Halter’s new round, valuing the cattle AI startup at $2 billion.
  
• Halter’s solar-powered collars move and monitor cattle remotely using an algorithm called Cowgorithm.
  
• US ranchers saved $220 million in fencing costs using Halter’s 11,000-mile virtual fence network.
  
• Halter charges $5 to $8 per animal monthly, creating recurring revenue that scales with herd size.

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund is set to lead a new funding round for Halter, an AI-powered cattle collar startup. The round would value the Auckland-based company at more than $2 billion before new money is counted.

Halter makes solar-powered GPS collars that let farmers herd and monitor cattle remotely through a smartphone app. The deal is heavily oversubscribed and final terms may still change.

Founders Fund Places a Major Bet on AI-Driven Farming

Founders Fund’s decision to back Halter ranks among the firm’s most notable agtech moves. Peter Thiel built it into one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital firms.

Its entry into agricultural technology through Halter signals a shift in where major capital is now heading.

The round values Halter at $2 billion before new money is counted. That doubles its $1 billion valuation reached in June, when BOND led a $100 million raise. Reaching that mark in under one year is rare in any technology sector.

Halter and Founders Fund both declined to comment. Sources familiar with the matter asked not to be identified as talks remain private.

The deal is heavily oversubscribed, meaning demand exceeded what Halter originally sought. The final round size remains undetermined.

Founders Fund’s entry comes as the agtech sector recovers from a prolonged slump. Many agricultural technology companies declared bankruptcy in recent years as adoption lagged.

Halter has been a consistent exception, growing steadily while others failed. That track record drew Founders Fund’s attention.

One widely shared post captured the product’s appeal simply: “A farmer opens an app, taps a button, and 600,000 cows across three countries start walking toward the milking station on their own.” For Thiel’s firm, it reflects a belief that AI in farming can deliver outsized returns.

What Founders Fund Is Betting On Inside Halter’s Technology

Halter’s product is a solar-powered GPS collar worn by cattle. Farmers manage herds through an app sending vibration and audio cues to each collar.

A single tap moves a herd to a milking station with no dogs, fences, or labor needed. The company trademarked this system as the “Cowgorithm.”

Each collar tracks digestion, fertility cycles, and health patterns around the clock. Machine learning models trained on hundreds of thousands of animals power these features.

US ranchers have mapped over 11,000 miles of virtual fencing, saving an estimated $220 million in physical fencing costs.

Halter charges farmers between $5 and $8 per animal per month. As more cattle are collared, revenue compounds and customer retention deepens.

This mirrors the subscription frameworks that firms like Founders Fund know well. Recurring revenue tied to a growing animal base makes for a compelling investment profile.

Halter was founded by Craig Piggott, a former rocket engineer at Rocket Lab. “The goal was to make pasture farming more sustainable and productive using technology,” he told Bloomberg in 2024. His engineering background shaped both the collar hardware and the algorithm driving it.

The company is based in Auckland and has opened a Colorado office to support US expansion. That move reflects growing demand from American ranchers adopting precision farming tools.

Founders Fund is now betting that Piggott’s vision for agriculture is as transformative as anything the firm has previously backed.

Bitcoin has given back last week’s gains in a single weekend.

The largest cryptocurrency slid to $69,192 on Sunday morning, down 2.2% over the past 24 hours and 3.1% on the week, after U.S. president Donald Trump issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Iran late Saturday demanding the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz or face attacks on the country’s power plants.

Trump said he would “hit and obliterate” Iran’s power plants, beginning with the largest, if the strait wasn’t opened to commercial shipping.

The threat marks a dramatic escalation from Friday, when Trump said he was thinking about “winding down” the military operation. Going from winding down to threatening civilian infrastructure in 24 hours whipsawed a market that had spent the previous week building confidence around de-escalation.

The liquidation data shows how one-sided the positioning was heading into the weekend. CoinGlass data shows $299 million in total liquidations over the past 24 hours across 84,239 traders, with long liquidations accounting for $254 million, roughly 85% of the total.

Bitcoin longs took $122 million in damage. Ether longs lost $95.7 million. The largest single liquidation was a $10 million BTC-USDT swap on OKX. The lopsided ratio confirms the market was leaning heavily bullish after eight consecutive days of gains heading into the weekend, leaving it vulnerable to exactly this kind of headline shock.

Major tokens fell in lockstep, meanwhile. Ether dropped 1.8% to $2,114, XRP lost 2.5% to $1.41, BNB slid 1.4% to $633, solana fell 2.1% to $88.55, and dogecoin lost 2.7% to $0.092. The only majors green on the week were ether at 0.8% and solana at 0.7%. Everything else is red over seven days.

The 48-hour window means the deadline arrives Monday evening. If Iran doesn’t comply, and there’s no indication it will, the market faces the prospect of strikes on power infrastructure, which would be the first direct targeting of civilian energy systems in the conflict.

The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed to most commercial traffic, with roughly 20% of the world’s oil and gas flows still disrupted.

Last week’s rally to $75,912 now looks like it was built on ceasefire speculation that evaporated over the weekend. The Fed held rates on Wednesday with a dovish lean that should have supported risk assets, but the persistent risk of war headlines has traders holding back from making outsized directional bets.

TLDR:

• Bitcoin put/call open interest ratio averaged 0.77, its highest reading since China banned mining in June 2021. 
• Put premiums relative to BTC spot volume hit an all-time high of 4 basis points, tripling mid-2022 levels.
• Historical data shows D9 skew decile has produced average 90-day BTC returns of +13.2%, the strongest of all deciles.
• Aggregate miner BTC balances sit at 684,000 BTC, with miners selling nearly all newly issued supply over the past year.

Bitcoin markets entered a consolidation phase following a sharp price drawdown in early 2026. VanEck’s mid-March Bitcoin ChainCheck report reveals deeply defensive positioning across derivatives markets.

The put/call open interest ratio reached its highest level since June 2021. Realized volatility dropped from 80 to 50, while futures funding rates fell to 2.7%. Onchain activity declined broadly as miner revenues came under pressure.

Bitcoin Options Positioning Reflects Elevated Demand for Downside Protection

Bitcoin options markets are showing an unusual level of caution among investors. The put/call open interest ratio peaked at 0.84 and averaged 0.77 over the past month.

This places the metric in the 91st percentile of all observations recorded since mid-2019. The last time the ratio reached these levels was June 2021, when China banned Bitcoin mining.

Total put premiums over the past 30 days reached approximately $685 million. That figure represents a 24% decline month-over-month, yet it still exceeds 77% of monthly readings since early 2025.

Relative to spot volume, put premiums hit an all-time high of roughly 4 basis points. This is about three times the levels seen after the Terra/Luna collapse in mid-2022.

Meanwhile, call option premiums fell roughly 12% to around $562 million. This decline further confirms a broad shift toward protective positioning in the market.

Total options open interest still rose 3% month-over-month to $33.4 billion. Futures leverage, however, remained subdued throughout the period.

VanEck’s report also examined the put/call premiums paid ratio, which reached 2.0 for the 30-day period ending March 3, 2026. Implied volatility on puts averaged around 66, sitting approximately 16 points above realized volatility.

Historically, skew readings at this decile have preceded average 90-day Bitcoin returns of +13.2%. Average 360-day returns from similar readings came in at +133.2%.

Onchain Activity and Miner Economics Show Broad Pressure

Onchain network activity declined across nearly every major metric over the past month. Transfer volume fell 31%, while total daily fees dropped 27%.

Daily active addresses declined 5%, and mean transaction fees fell by 40%. Transaction count was the only category that posted a modest increase.

A growing share of Bitcoin trading now occurs through ETPs, derivatives, and centralized exchanges. As a result, traditional onchain metrics may no longer capture total market activity accurately.

This shift makes it harder to use network data alone as a sentiment indicator. The trend reflects Bitcoin’s increasing financialization across institutional markets.

On the miner side, total revenues declined 11% over the past month. Mining equities fell roughly 7%, pointing to weaker profitability across the sector.

Miner outflows to exchanges rose only 1% in Bitcoin terms. Most operators appear to be managing reserves carefully rather than liquidating holdings.

Aggregate miner balances currently sit at approximately 684,000 BTC, down only 0.5% year-over-year. Over the same period, roughly 164,000 new BTC were mined and effectively sold.

Long-term holder transfer volume declined across every age cohort during the period. Active long-term Bitcoin supply also edged down from 31% to 30%.

A stablecoin tied to the crypto project Resolv Labs has lost its peg to the US dollar after an attacker was able to exploit the token’s contract to create millions of tokens for themselves.

Resolv Labs posted to X on Sunday that it had experienced an exploit that allowed an attacker to mint 50 million unbacked Resolv USR (USR). “The team has currently paused all the protocol functions to prevent further malicious actions and is actively working on recovery,” it added.

The X account “yieldsandmore” had posted to the platform earlier on Sunday that USR had crashed after on-chain data showed an attacker was able to mint 50 million USR by depositing $100,000 worth of the stablecoin USDC (USDC).

The attacker was also able to mint an additional 30 million USR tokens, according to the crypto security company PeckShield.

The crypto fund D2 Finance said that the minting function on USR’s contract was somehow broken. “Either the oracle was gamed, the off-chain signer was compromised, or the amount validation between request and completion is simply missing,” it added.

The exploit comes after crypto-related hacks declined sharply in February, with $49 million lost to exploits over the month, compared to $385 million in January, with attackers increasingly preferring phishing scams over protocol exploits.

Attacker cashing out “at full speed” depegs USR 

D2 Finance said the attacker quickly moved the 50 million USR they minted to multiple crypto protocols, swapping the tokens for the stablecoins USDC and USDt (USDT) before “aggressively” converting them to Ether (ETH).

“The attacker’s exit playbook is textbook DeFi hack cashout running at full speed,” it said.

D2 Finance added that USR was selling as low as 50 cents on some trades as liquidity and slippage worsened across protocols, with “multiple failed transactions visible on-chain showing the urgency.”

The firm estimated that the attacker was able to extract around $25 million from the attack amid USR’s depeg.

Related: Google Threat Intel flags ‘Ghostblade’ crypto-stealing malware

USR is currently trading at around 87 cents, around 13% off from the $1 peg the token aims to maintain, according to CoinGecko.

The token had crashed to a low of 2.5 cents on a USR/USDC pool on the protocol Curve Finance, USR’s most liquid pool with a 24-hour volume of $3.6 million, per DEX Screener.

USR hit its bottom on Curve at 2:38 am UTC on Sunday, just 17 minutes after the attacker minted $50 million worth of the token. The pool has since recovered to trade at 84.5 cents.

Magazine: Meet the onchain crypto detectives fighting crime better than the cops