The Bitcoin network is scaling up at an industrial level, with energy-intensive mining rigs pushing power consumption to record highs—even as transaction volumes dwindle. This has created a growing imbalance: a surging hashrate and expanding infrastructure are colliding with weak transaction fees and infrequent mempool clearings, leaving miners heavily reliant on block subsidies for earnings.
Bitcoin is entering a phase of stark contradictions. While its demand for electricity is skyrocketing, miner revenues are increasingly under strain due to sluggish on-chain activity. A new report from GoMining Institutional, shared with crypto.news, paints a picture of accelerating power consumption, subdued mining difficulty, and an unusually quiet network—raising concerns about the long-term sustainability of current trends.
The report highlights what it calls an “unprecedented pace” of energy growth. Citing CoinMetrics Labs data, GoMining notes that Bitcoin mining’s estimated energy consumption jumped from 15.6 gigawatts (GW) in January 2024 to 24.5 GW by January 2025. Just five months later, in May 2025, that figure surged to 33.1 GW—more than doubling in only 17 months.
A significant portion of that growth occurred in early 2025. “The January-to-May jump alone — a 35% rise in energy demand — reflects both heightened deployment of more energy-dense mining infrastructure following the April halving,” the report explains.
Despite advances in machine-level efficiency, the sheer number of new mining rigs is outpacing those gains. “Efficiency improvements are increasingly being negated by the scale of hardware deployment,” the report notes, emphasizing that innovation must now go beyond ASIC design to include how and where miners source their energy.
Steepest decline since 2021
The surge in Bitcoin’s energy consumption contrasts sharply with the network’s relatively subdued mining difficulty—a key metric that gauges how hard it is to validate new blocks. During the first half of 2025, there were 13 difficulty adjustments, with the figure rising modestly from 109.78 trillion in January to 116.96 trillion by the end of June. That marks a year-to-date increase of just 6.54%, averaging only 1.09% growth per month.
This muted pace stands in stark contrast to the rapid rise seen in 2024, when difficulty increased by an average of 4.48% each month. Still, 2025 hasn’t been without volatility. Notable spikes included a 6.81% jump on April 5 and a 4.38% increase on May 30, which pushed difficulty to an all-time high of 126.98 trillion. However, that peak was short-lived.
By late June, extreme heat across North America forced some mining operations offline, leading to a drop in hashrate of 147 EH/s. As a result, the network saw a sharp -7.48% difficulty adjustment—the steepest decline since the aftermath of China’s mining ban in July 2021.
While energy use continues to climb, Bitcoin’s transaction layer is telling a different story. On-chain activity in the first half of 2025 has fallen to its lowest levels since October 2023. As of June 25, the seven-day moving average of daily transactions had dropped to around 313,510, with a yearly low of just 256,000 confirmed transactions recorded on June 1.
This decline in activity has driven transaction fees to historic lows. Throughout the year, users have consistently been able to broadcast transactions at the network’s minimum fee of 1 satoshi per virtual byte—regardless of urgency. “Throughout H1, there were multiple occasions when transactions — regardless of priority level — could be broadcast for the bare minimum fee of just 1 sat/vB,” the report noted, underscoring the persistently weak demand for blockspace across the network.
Ghosted mempool
This environment has led to a rare occurrence: a completely cleared mempool. The mempool—Bitcoin’s queue for unconfirmed transactions—emptied twice in 2025, something that hadn’t happened in nearly two years. The last similar event occurred in April 2023, before Ordinals and BRC-20 token activity began to consistently congest block space.
According to the report, when the mempool clears, miners briefly earn “almost no transaction fee revenue,” relying almost entirely on the fixed block subsidy for income. This highlights a fundamental long-term concern for Bitcoin’s economic model. As the block subsidy continues to halve every four years—and will eventually phase out altogether—the network is expected to depend on transaction fees to incentivize miners. While low-fee environments benefit users, they put additional financial pressure on mining operations already burdened by rising energy costs.
For Bitcoin miners, the growing disconnect between surging energy demands and shrinking revenues is becoming increasingly difficult to overlook. Recent heatwaves across major U.S. mining hubs have already exposed how vulnerable the hashrate can be to environmental stress. At the same time, the network’s energy consumption has more than doubled since early 2024—far outpacing the growth in transaction activity or fee income.
Industry analysts warn that this imbalance may persist. Mining companies continue to roll out increasingly power-hungry hardware to secure the network and chase block rewards. Yet, their long-term viability hinges on variables largely beyond their control: user demand, transaction volume, and Bitcoin’s fixed halving schedule. With halvings set to occur roughly every four years until around 2140—when the final bitcoin is mined and the block subsidy drops to zero—the pressure on miners to adapt to a fee-driven model will only intensify.
