Rapha Zagury, CEO of Twenty One Capital and founder of Elektron Energy, said at Bitcoin Asia 2026 that the Bitcoin network is going through the first hashrate bear market in its history.
According to Zagury, Bitcoin network hashrate rose to nearly 1.3 ZH/s late last year and then began a slow decline. He said the time elapsed since the network pulled back from that peak is now the longest on record.
Zagury said Bitcoin mining should not be framed as simply a "good business" or a "bad business." In his view, the deciding factor is where a mining company sits on the cost curve. Operators with lower energy costs and more efficient machines can maintain higher margins. Those facing higher power costs and less efficient equipment may be forced to shut machines down.
He added that Bitcoin hash price has improved from earlier levels, but remains relatively low when measured against historical levels. Mining is more likely to outperform BTC, he said, when Bitcoin’s price rises faster than network hashrate.
For companies, Zagury said the best risk-adjusted allocation is not choosing only between buying BTC and mining, but combining both. Even so, he said that if there were only $1 to allocate, he would prioritize buying BTC.
On energy, Zagury said energy consumption does not in itself equal waste, and described energy as a foundation for economic development and human progress. He argued that one of Bitcoin mining’s biggest advantages is its highly flexible load profile: mining machines can be turned on and off quickly depending on available energy supply. That, he said, allows miners to absorb idle or excess electricity and can strengthen grid stability to some extent.
He also said Bitcoin mining is beginning to generate what he described as option value that was not previously obvious, including in energy use, market share, proximity to the Bitcoin protocol, and infrastructure. As demand for AI and high-performance computing grows, existing energy and data center infrastructure owned by miners could also find additional use cases in AI compute and related workloads.
Zagury added that among large publicly listed mining companies, fewer and fewer are still able to sustain large-scale Bitcoin mining, and said the industry is at a key point where the energy revolution and the Bitcoin revolution are meeting.