Rootstock’s Q1 2026 merged-mining report shows that 84.01 percent of Bitcoin’s total hashrate contributed to securing the Rootstock sidechain during the quarter, averaging 833.92 exahashes per second. The data provides the clearest signal yet that Bitcoin’s mining infrastructure is increasingly being leveraged to secure smart-contract layers, even as fee revenue from these additional security services remains limited for miners.

How Merged Mining Extends Bitcoin Security to DeFi Applications

Merged mining allows Bitcoin miners to submit proof-of-work to Rootstock simultaneously while continuing to mine Bitcoin, without requiring additional hardware or interrupting primary mining operations. Rootstock reported that 93.10 percent of observed mining-pool hashrate participated in merged mining during Q1, with major pools including Foundry USA, AntPool, F2Pool, and ViaBTC contributing to the network.

The distinction between pool-level participation and individual miner intent matters for interpreting the 84 percent figure. The metric tracks hashrate contributed through mining pools rather than measuring each miner’s deliberate decision to secure Rootstock. Mining pool operators enable merged mining at the pool level, meaning individual miners within those pools automatically contribute hashrate to Rootstock without necessarily opting in. This makes the figure a measure of infrastructure availability rather than intentional DeFi security demand.

Fee Revenue Gap Between Security Contribution and Miner Economics

Despite the high hashrate participation, Bitcoin miners have seen limited fee upside from securing Rootstock and the broader Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem. Rootstock’s transaction volume and fee generation remain modest relative to the security budget that 84 percent of Bitcoin’s hashrate represents. This creates an imbalance where miners provide substantial security infrastructure but receive proportionally small additional revenue in return.

The fee revenue question is central to the long-term viability of Bitcoin DeFi secured through merged mining. For the model to be sustainable, Rootstock and similar Bitcoin sidechains need to generate sufficient on-chain activity and fee volume to make merged mining economically meaningful beyond its current marginal contribution. Without that fee growth, the high hashrate participation reflects more the low cost of opting in than genuine economic demand for Bitcoin DeFi security.

Bitcoin DeFi Ecosystem Expands Beyond Rootstock

The merged-mining data arrives as the broader Bitcoin DeFi category, often termed BTCFi, continues to expand through multiple approaches beyond sidechains. Layer-2 networks, ordinals-based protocols, and wrapped Bitcoin on alternative chains have all contributed to growing Bitcoin’s presence in decentralized finance applications. The security question that Rootstock’s report highlights applies broadly: how much of Bitcoin’s existing security infrastructure can be repurposed for DeFi without creating new attack surfaces or diluting miner incentives.

Risks and Uncertainties

The 84 percent hashrate figure, while impressive, does not indicate that 84 percent of Bitcoin miners have made an active economic decision to participate in Bitcoin DeFi. The low cost of merged mining at the pool level means participation could decline quickly if pool operators change their configurations or if network conditions shift. Additionally, the security that merged mining provides depends on the economic incentives remaining aligned; if fee revenue does not grow, the argument for maintaining merged mining becomes primarily one of negligible cost rather than positive economic value.

Competing approaches to Bitcoin DeFi security, including federated models and zero-knowledge proof systems, could also erode merged mining’s relevance if they prove more efficient at bootstrapping smart-contract layer security. The Rootstock report provides a snapshot of current infrastructure overlap but does not resolve the question of whether Bitcoin’s hashrate-backed security model will be the dominant approach for Bitcoin DeFi in the longer term.

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