After months of rapid expansion, Bitcoin’s hashrate growth slowed down in January, according to the latest report from TheMinerMag.

The network’s difficulty saw its first decline since September, indicating that even though publicly listed companies have kept increasing their hash power, their growth isn’t enough to compensate for the capitulation of other, probably smaller operators.

The total revenue made from bitcoin (BTC) mining remained stable at $1.4 billion for the month. Publicly traded mining companies, which collectively hold 99,000 bitcoin (worth roughly $9.7 billion), accounted for about 30% of the hashrate market share in January.

Competition between the biggest publicly traded companies has also increased.

The leading mining firm, Marathon Digital (MARA), retained its top spot with a realized hashrate of 41.65 EH/s, followed by CleanSpark at 34.77 EH/s. Riot Platforms, which has been expanding aggressively, is closing in with 31.27 EH/s.

“Notably, the competition within the 30 EH/s group is heating up like never before, while the gap between the 30 EH/s tier and the 10 EH/s group — comprising Core Scientific, Cipher Mining, and Bitfarms — continues to widen,” the report said.

The top miners taking more market share is hardly a surprise as the recent halving event has cut bitcoin mining rewards by half and squeezed the industry’s profit margin, even with the BTC price near $100,000. In such an environment, it’s tough for smaller players to compete with big operations which were already positioned to dominate the market. In fact, a lot of miners are already looking for other revenue sources, such as hosting machines for AI and HPC firms.

Read more: Bitcoin Halving Is a ‘Show Me the Money’ Moment for Miners

The report also said that mining hardware imports to the U.S. also slowed in January, a factor contributing to the stabilization of hashrate growth. However, some firms, including Blockchain Power Corp and AcroHash, have imported a significant amount of cooling infrastructure from Bitmain.

Looking ahead, TheMinerMag predicts another difficulty adjustment decline in February as some smaller mining operators exit the market due to lower profitability.

Read more: Bitcoin Mining Is a Game of Survival, Consolidation and Potential AI Diversification: Bernstein

Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.