Bitcoin mining revenue slumped to its lowest monthly level since September 2023 during August as miners continue to grapple with the post-halving landscape. Data from The Block shows Bitcoin miner revenue dropping 10% month-over-month to $851 million in August. Miner revenue has now tanked 57.5% since surging to an all-time of $2 billion in March, which coincided with all-time price highs for BTC. The data includes both subsidy fees — newly minted BTC that the network distributes to miners as a reward for mining blocks, also known as block rewards — and transaction fees paid by users to ensure transactions are included in blocks. Post-halving woes August’s low revenue is the latest evidence that many Bitcoin miners are struggling to remain profitable following Bitcoin’s fourth quadrennial halving in April. The halving reduces new block rewards by 50% and serves as a mechanism for reducing BTC inflation, The number of BTC distributed as rewards with each newly mined block fell to 3.125 BTC from 6.25 BTC following the latest halving. The data shows miners bagging revenue of $964.2 million in May, compared to $1.79 billion during April. Despite the sharp drop in block rewards, hash rate — a measurement of the total computational power commanded by miners — posted a new all-time high of 782.6 exahashes per second (EH/s) on Aug. 23, according to data from CoinWarz. With hash rate continuing to trend high, the data shows that a large number of miners remain in competition despite block rewards dropping by half in April. For context, Bitcoin’s hash rate is up 66% compared to September 2023, when block rewards were double what they are today. Data from CoinWarz similarly shows difficulty posting an all-time high of more than 90.6 trillion difficulty points during August. Bitcoin’s mining difficulty adjusts every two weeks to maintain an average block time of around ten minutes. BitFuFu, a cloud mining service provider, recently reported it spent $51,887 on average to mine a single Bitcoin in the second quarter of 2024, compared to $19,344 in the second quarter of 2023. The price of BTC is down 15.4% since the fourth Bitcoin halving, according to The Defiant's crypto price feeds. Bitcoin transaction fees fall Bitcoin miners are also feeling the pinch following a sharp decline in transaction fee revenue. The average transaction fee paid by network users is down nearly 45% to $0.579 from $1 in September 2023, according to Blockchain.com. As a result, transaction fees accounted for just $20.7 million or 2.44% of miner revenue in August, down from an all-time high of $337.3 million or 21.6% of revenue in December 2023. The decline in transaction fees comes despite Bitcoin’s daily transaction count oscillating between 380,000 and 800,000 during August — more than the between 372,000 and 731,500 hosted by the network in December. The sharp drop in Bitcoin transaction fees coincided with the emergence of Runes, a standard for creating fungible tokens on Bitcoin that went live in April. Runes accounted for up to 35% of daily transactions on Bitcoin during August, while BRC-20 — the fee-intense fungible tokens standard Runes sought to improve upon — comprised as little as 1.25% of transactions last month, according to Dune Analytics. Hash rate centralization The Bitcoin network is also facing a challenge in the form of increasing centralization, with the dominance of large mining pools growing as smaller miners grapple with the challenges of the post-halving landscape. According to data from Hashrate Index, Foundry USA accounts for 33.1% of the Bitcoin network’s total hashing power, followed by Antpool with 22.4%, ViaBTC with 14.7%, and F2Pool with 9.1%. Miners look to AI amid revenue decline Faced with diminishing returns, an increasing number of miners are diverting their resources towards the booming AI sector On June 3, Core Scientific, a Bitcoin mining company, announced it had inked a $3.5 billion deal with CoreWeave, an AI cloud provider. Core Scientific will deliver an additional 200 megawatts of infrastructure to bolster CoreWeave's high-performance computing operations per the agreement. Hut 8, a Bitcoin mining and infrastructure firm, also reported it had acquired 1,000 Nvidia GPUs and signed a customer agreement with an AI cloud platform in June. In May, Bit Digital, an AI and digital assets infrastructure company, announced that 251 of its servers were generating revenue from AI activities, earning approximately $4.1 million in April. Read More: Bitcoin Miners Nurse Losses as BTC Struggles to Hold $50K