Bitcoin isn’t the only asset feeling the heat from Wednesday’s hawkish Federal Reserve meeting. The Japanese yen is also under heavy pressure, sliding toward four-decade lows.
The yen weakened to 161.80 per U.S. dollar in early trading, just below its 2024 low of 161.95 and dangerously close to its weakest level in nearly 40 years.
The move comes after Fed officials raised their interest-rate projections for 2026 and 2027, reinforcing expectations for a stronger U.S. dollar across global markets. Although the Bank of Japan raised its key rate to 1% earlier this week, that remains far below the U.S. federal funds rate of 3.5%. This large interest-rate differential continues to work against the yen.
Adding to the pressure, the BOJ also decided to pause the tapering of its bond purchases, a dovish signal that largely offset the impact of its rate hike.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin has fallen sharply from Monday’s high near $67,000 to around $62,700, with selling accelerating in the wake of the Fed’s more hawkish stance.
Bitcoin has spent five straight months trading below what it costs to produce, squeezing miners and forcing some to sell, JPMorgan said in a note. The bank pegs the cost to mine one bitcoin at about $78,000, well above the roughly $62,500 the asset fetches now.
The strain is showing and about 20% of miners are now unprofitable, the bank said citing CoinShares data, and publicly traded miners sold more than 32,000 bitcoin in the first quarter to cover operating costs, more than they offloaded in all of 2025.
The network is adjusting on its own. When the price drops below cost, higher-cost miners power down, the hashrate, or total computing power securing the network, falls, and mining difficulty, the automatic setting for how hard it is to mine, resets lower.
That played out in early June, when difficulty dropped 10%, the second decline of that size this year.
Miners are also reacting faster than before. JPMorgan says the sensitivity of difficulty to price has climbed, with more operators sitting near breakeven and flipping machines on or off as prices move. The bank expects larger and more frequent adjustments for as long as bitcoin stays below its production cost.
The outlook is cautious, but JPMorgan flags one upside. The weak sentiment around the sector could itself prove a bullish contrarian signal, echoing the run of accumulation readings, from whale buying to falling exchange reserves, pointing the same way this month.
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