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News · Sep 29, 2026 · 3 min read

Bitcoin today: parked under JPMorgan's $85,000 mining floor as ETF flows turn 2026 positive

Bitcoin has closed four sessions in a row under the price JPMorgan calls miners' break-even, even as the ETFs that fuelled September's rally posted their best week since October 2025 and pushed 2026's flows into the green for the first time all year.

A bright, immaculate air-cooled bitcoin mining aisle, rows of ASIC miners with yellow cable looms receding down a clean concrete aisle

Bitcoin can't hold the line JPMorgan calls miners' break-even

On 24 September, a JPMorgan team led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou told clients bitcoin had just crossed above its estimated all-in mining cost of roughly $85,000, having spent 280 straight days below it. "To the extent it is sustained, this new backdrop should provide relief to bitcoin miners, thus reducing the risk of forced selling by them," the note said, as The Block reported. The bank added that a price held above that floor could also slow hashrate growth and ease concentration risk across the network.

"Sustained" is the word doing the work. Bitcoin peaked at $86,607.63 on 22 September, then closed every session since under $85,000: $84,384.61 on the 24th, $84,380.26 on the 25th, $84,087.22 on the 26th, $84,423.31 on the 27th, and it was changing hands near $84,440 again on Monday. Four sessions of relief have not yet arrived — the network is sitting almost exactly on the line, not clearly above it.

Chart: The electricity cost of one mined bitcoin on our own site rates against the market price — a different line to JPMorgan's network-wide estimate, but the same idea: at 3.9 and 6 cents the gap to the price has stayed wide all year, at any rate near JPMorgan's implied average it has just closed. Open the chart

The ETFs had their best week since October, then went quiet for the weekend

US spot bitcoin ETFs took in $2.4 billion in the week to 25 September, their strongest week since October 2025, enough to flip 2026's year-to-date flows positive — about $934 million in the green, two months after they were nearly $6 billion under water, The Block reported. "Monday's $1bn inflow was 9th largest ever," Nate Geraci of NovaDius Wealth Management noted of the 21 September day covered in our piece on the squeeze and the ETF flood.

That capped seven straight days of inflows running from 17 to 25 September, worth $3.0 billion in total. The last of those days was the smallest: $134.5 million on 25 September, per KuCoin's flash report. No new flow figure has posted since — US markets were shut for the weekend — so the streak's fate over four sessions is still open.

A quiet flush of long positions over the weekend

Our own liquidations data show $61.2 million of long bitcoin futures positions force-closed on 28 September against $7.1 million of shorts, the largest single day since the $82.8 million of longs closed on 24 September and well short of the $131.1 million on 23 September or the $195.3 million on 15 September. Funding stayed close to zero through it — annualised at roughly 0.001% on the day — so this reads as thin weekend liquidity shaking out a handful of overleveraged longs, not a shift in positioning.

Difficulty is due its first pullback since August

Mining difficulty rose 4.16% at the 19 September retarget, to 132.76 trillion — its biggest single jump since the 7.15% rise on 27 June, our difficulty adjustments show. The next retarget, due in about five days at block 969,696, is currently tracking a decline of just under 1%, which would be the first give-back since the 1.31% cut on 23 August. A small easing, not a trend reversal: three of the last four adjustments before this one were increases.

The SEC's steadiest crypto vote leaves next week

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, the "Crypto Mom" who built and ran the agency's Crypto Task Force, announced on 25 September that she will resign effective 2 October, posting her letter on X, CoinDesk reported. Her departure leaves the commission at exactly two members — Chairman Paul Atkins and Mark Uyeda — its bare quorum, in the middle of the crypto market-structure rulemaking her task force started. She is headed to teach law at Regent University.

"Maximizing people's freedom to choose what is best for themselves and their families within sensible regulatory parameters designed to give them the confidence to transact with others is a delicate and vitally important task for the regulator," Peirce said of the balance she tried to strike.

What it means for miners

JPMorgan's $85,000 figure is a network-wide average, not a claim about any one site or machine, but the mechanism underneath it is the one this site is built on: cost per bitcoin is what electricity costs, never what the hardware cost, and the coins mined against that cost are never sold to cover it. At a fraction of $85,000 in electricity, the break-even debate playing out in the market at large is one the cheapest sites settled long ago.

The difficulty easing back even slightly at the next retarget is a small tailwind on top of that. Hashprice has held close to $40 per petahash per day through the whole stretch either side of the $85,000 line — $40.31 on 24 and 25 September, $40.17 today — which is the number worth watching more than any single day's price close.

Sources and further reading

Disclosure

Firsthand Bitcoin sells and hosts mining hardware, including this machine. No manufacturer, distributor or affiliate programme paid for or reviewed this page and we take no commission on the links above. Historical figures are computed from daily bitcoin price and network hashprice, each day valued at its own prices. Nothing here is investment advice.