What Is a ‘Negative Difficulty Adjustment’ and What Causes It?

A negative difficulty adjustment means the network's mining difficulty is reduced. This occurs when the time taken to mine the last 2,016 blocks exceeds the target two-week period.

This is typically caused by a significant number of miners shutting down their operations, often due to falling cryptocurrency prices, rising electricity costs, or regulatory crackdowns, leading to a drop in the total network hash rate.