Bitcoin Halving 2024 Aftermath and 2028 Outlook

I work in the crypto self-custody space, and every four years the same three questions come back at me. Will the halving pump Bitcoin. What happens to miners. When does this end. The 2024 cycle answered the first two in ways no prior cycle could.

At 00:09 UTC on 20 April 2024, block 840,000 did what the code told it to do. The block reward dropped from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC. Miners kept hashing. Blocks kept coming. The market around that block looked like no cycle before it.

Here is what happened, and what 2028 sets up.

TL;DR

Every 210,000 blocks, about four years, Bitcoin's block reward halves. That rule enforces the 21-million supply cap. The fourth halving came at block 840,000 on 20 April 2024 UTC. The reward dropped from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC, and new issuance fell from about 900 to about 450 BTC a day. The 2024 event was the first with US spot ETFs trading, approved by the SEC on 10 January 2024. On 11 October 2026 the chain sat at block 970,968, 79,032 blocks before the fifth halving, which on that count lands in March or April 2028.

How the halving rule works

The bitcoin halving is a built-in rule that cuts the reward miners receive for producing a new block by exactly 50% every 210,000 blocks, the nSubsidyHalvingInterval in Bitcoin Core's chain parameters. At the target of one block every 10 minutes, set in the same file, 210,000 blocks take about four years.

Bitcoin's total supply stays under 21 million, the MAX_MONEY limit in consensus/amount.h. The halving keeps issuance below it: GetBlockSubsidy starts at 50 BTC and shifts the amount right by one bit per halving, so all rewards together add up to 20,999,999.9769 BTC (my sum of 210,000 blocks times each era's reward). No central bank can override it. No committee can vote it away. Every node rejects a block whose miner pays itself more than the subsidy plus fees, with the error bad-cb-amount, so raising the reward would take a hard fork.

The schedule so far, with times and fees read from each block on mempool.space:

Daily issuance halves at each step. At 144 blocks a day, the count that follows from the 10-minute target, it went from about 900 BTC a day before April 2024 to about 450 BTC a day after. Shrinking issuance on a fixed timetable is what the rule exists to do.

Block 840,000 and the Runes rush

A miner found block 840,000 at 00:09 UTC on 20 April 2024, which was still the evening of 19 April in the United States. In my view no block of the four years before it mattered more to miners.

The reward halved on schedule. The Runes protocol activates on block 840,000 as well. Runes is a standard for interchangeable tokens on Bitcoin's base layer, built by the same project as Bitcoin Ordinals. People rushed to etch the first runes into that block. It paid its miner 37.63 BTC in fees, about $2.4 million at mempool.space's price index of $63,847 for that hour, and twelve times the 3.125 BTC subsidy.

For miners that block was a preview of what a fee-funded network looks like.

Hash price crashed and difficulty climbed

One number shows the stress test the mining industry took. By May 2025, Fidelity Digital Assets measured the hash price down roughly 60% since April 2024. Hash price is the expected revenue for each unit of hash a miner produces. Operations with aging hardware and expensive energy contracts faced a margin squeeze they could not engineer their way out of.

Difficulty climbed anyway. It stood at 86.39 trillion at block 840,000, set by the adjustment of 10 April 2024. In the same Fidelity report, the 30-day mean hash rate and difficulty were up roughly 40% a year after the halving. Difficulty first passed 136 trillion on 5 September 2025 and peaked at 155.97 trillion on 29 October 2025. Difficulty is a plain number, not a hashrate unit.

Two forces explain that divergence. Bitcoin's price rose 31% in the year to 15 April 2025, from $63,762 on halving day to $83,671, according to Fidelity. And the miners who survived were already scaled and tuned. Hash price measures revenue per unit of hash, so a rising price can pay for more machines even while hash price falls. Total hash rate climbed while per-machine economics tightened.

Difficulty also gives the hash rate it implies: difficulty times 2^32, divided by 600 seconds. At the halving's 86.39 trillion that is about 618 exahashes per second. At the 132.72 trillion in force on 11 October 2026 it is about 950 exahashes per second, 54% above the halving level (my arithmetic on mempool.space data).

How spot ETFs changed the post-halving equation

Earlier halvings played out among retail buyers and early adopters, with a thin institutional layer on top. The 2024 halving had a different cast.

The SEC approved the first US spot bitcoin exchange-traded products on 10 January 2024, three months before the halving (see Bitcoin ETFs for the full breakdown). BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust alone reported net assets of $66.28 billion on 9 October 2026. Corporate treasuries were in the market too: MicroStrategy announced its first purchase, 21,454 bitcoins for $250 million, on 11 August 2020, three months after the 2020 halving.

In my view, that collision of a protocol supply cut with institutional demand, not the halving alone, drove the post-halving price move. In 2020 the halving cut new issuance from about 1,800 to about 900 BTC a day, at the same 144 blocks a day, against mostly retail demand.

If you want to buy Bitcoin in Switzerland, read how to buy Bitcoin in Switzerland for the most direct options.

Industrial scale mining took over

The post-halving environment sped up a shift that had been building since 2020. Bitcoin mining went industrial, and the public miners show how tight margins became.

Riot Platforms sold 475 bitcoins for net proceeds of $38.8 million in April 2025. Its CEO said Riot had decided "to sell our monthly production of bitcoin to fund ongoing growth and operations", which reduces "the need for equity fundraising".

One adaptation matters more than the rest. Some operations began renting their power and cooling to AI computing. Core Scientific signed 12-year contracts to deliver about 200 MW of infrastructure to host CoreWeave's high-performance computing, announced on 4 June 2024, six weeks after the halving. The same large-scale power and cooling that runs Bitcoin mining can serve GPU clusters for AI training.

Bitcoin crossed 100k in seven and a half months

Bitcoin's price passed $100,000 for the first time on 5 December 2024: mempool.space's hourly price index shows $101,270 at 03:00 UTC. That was 229 days after the halving block.

Returns compressed as the market grew. The table divides the highest price in the two years after each halving by the price at the halving block, both from mempool.space's USD price index. The index has one value per week before 2023, so the older peaks read lower than intraday highs.

The 2024 cycle, with a $100,000 milestone, was huge in absolute terms even as the multiple shrank.

Where this cycle sits in the four phase map

Erik Anderson's four-year cycle cheatsheet splits Bitcoin into four roughly one-year phases. In accumulation, the media says everything is dead and people who bought the top sell at a loss. In early growth, smart money is in, prices recover and the crowd has not noticed yet. In expansion, everyone is talking about it. Contraction follows, and his rule is that sitting out that year is the strategy.

His own cycle map labels 2024 to 2025 as recovery and growth: ETF approval, halving, $100k and more. In my view, 2026 sits between expansion and an early contraction signal, depending on which on-chain indicator you trust, and the 2028 halving probably catches the next accumulation low rather than a top.

I use the framework to position, and I leave price prediction out of it. If you know which phase you are in, you can act on a plan instead of on headlines.

The road to block 1,050,000

The fifth Bitcoin halving lands at block 1,050,000. On 11 October 2026 the chain stood at block 970,968, so 79,032 blocks remain. At one block per 10 minutes that is about 11 April 2028. At the recent average of 9.6 minutes per block it is about 19 March 2028. The block reward drops from 3.125 BTC to 1.5625 BTC. Daily issuance falls to about 225 BTC.

In my view, three dynamics from 2024 will shape how 2028 plays out:

• ETF demand stays. BlackRock's IBIT still reported $66.28 billion in net assets in October 2026, so institutional demand enters 2028 from a much larger base.
• Miner consolidation keeps going. The 2024 shakeout pushed listed miners to sell their production, as Riot did, or to rent power capacity to AI hosts, as Core Scientific did.
• Transaction fees have to carry more weight. At 1.5625 BTC per block, the subsidy is a small fraction of Bitcoin's early 50 BTC. The 37.63 BTC in fees at block 840,000 already hinted at what a fee-dominant future looks like.

The reward reaches zero after 33 halvings, at block 6,930,000, when the 50 BTC starting value shifted right 33 times becomes 0 satoshis in GetBlockSubsidy. At one block per 10 minutes that is around 2140. From then on miners earn only fees.

The lesson from 2024

Two and a half years on, the 2024 halving leaves you with one lesson. Bitcoin's monetary policy executes itself: four supply reductions have now run on schedule, each at its exact block height.

The reward halved, miners sold coins or rented out power, and hash rate still grew. Billions in ETF demand met reduced issuance, and the code still capped the subsidy at 3.125 BTC per block.

Block 1,050,000 will run the same check in 2028.

---

This post is a market retrospective and a positioning framework, not investment advice. Past halving cycles do not predict future Bitcoin price action. Hash rate, difficulty, ETF flows and miner economics change daily. Verify every figure against the cited primary sources before acting on them. Talk to a Swiss financial or tax adviser before deploying material capital.

Thinking about holding Bitcoin in Switzerland? Read Bitcoin and Swiss taxes before you decide on size.

---

Sources:

• Bitcoin Core source: halving interval and block target, block subsidy and MAX_MONEY
• mempool.space: block 840,000, difficulty adjustment history and USD price index
• Ordinals handbook: Runes specification
• Fidelity Digital Assets: 2024 Bitcoin Halving, One Year Later
• SEC: approval of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products
• iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF: key facts
• MicroStrategy press release, 11 August 2020
• Riot Platforms: April 2025 production update
• Core Scientific press release, 4 June 2024
• Erik Anderson: Four-Year Cycle Cheatsheet PDF

---

New to Bitcoin? Start with Chapter 1.

Want the full picture? Read all 19 chapters free or order the physical book.