U.S. winter storm Fernan cuts Foundry USA's Bitcoin hashrate by about 60% as miners reduce power load

The Block reported that winter storm Fernan across much of the United States prompted miners to cut power to ease grid stress, sending a significant portion of network hashrate offline. Foundry USA, largest by hashrate, cut connected computing power about 60% from roughly 328 EH/s to 139 EH/s since Friday; it accounts for about 23% of global pool hashrate. An estimated 200 EH/s of capacity is offline across the network, pushing average Bitcoin block times above the 10-minute protocol target to around 12.4 minutes. The next difficulty adjustment is expected to decrease by about 15%, and U.S.-focused pools Luxor, Antpool and Binance Pool also saw hashrate declines suggesting total reductions may exceed 110 EH/s.