Dogecoin's Hashrate Crash: Should You Still Solo Mine?

Dogecoin's network hashrate has dropped to roughly a third of where it stood in February. CoinWarz's Litecoin hashrate chart puts the network, which also secures Dogecoin through merged mining, at about 2.9 to 3.0 petahash per second in early October 2026, down from a record 8.72 petahash per second set on February 23. Put plainly, something close to two out of every three machines that were running the Dogecoin network back then have since been switched off. If you mine Scrypt coins at home, on a rig that also merge-mines Litecoin, that drop in dogecoin mining hashrate changes the math you're working with, whether you've noticed it or not.

This post is not going to tell you to keep mining or to quit. It's going to give you a short, honest checklist to run against your own setup, and the arithmetic to back it up.

What Actually Happened to Dogecoin's Hashrate

Dogecoin doesn't have its own mining algorithm in practice. Since 2014 it has been merge-mined with Litecoin: both run Scrypt, so a single rig can submit the same proof of work to both chains at once and collect both rewards. That means Dogecoin's security has always ridden on Litecoin's hashrate, not a separate miner base of its own.

When mining a coin stops covering its electricity bill, rigs get switched off, and the reported drop is consistent with that: a large share of the machines behind that February peak are no longer running. The machines that merge-mine Litecoin and Dogecoin together were not immune.

The upside buried in that drop: with fewer machines competing for the same Scrypt block rewards, each remaining rig's theoretical share of the total network got larger. That is a mechanical fact about hashrate, not a promise about your own results, and the checklist below treats it that way.

Run This Checklist Before You Decide Anything

Go through each line honestly. Don't check a box because you want it to be true.

• I know my rig's actual current hashrate, measured today, not the number printed on the box when I bought it.
• I know today's Litecoin network hashrate (the figure that also secures Dogecoin through merged mining), not a number from earlier this year.
• I know my real electricity cost per kilowatt-hour, including any fees my provider doesn't put in the headline rate.
• I've checked whether my current pool or software actually submits to both chains at once, or whether I'm leaving Litecoin rewards on the table while only mining Dogecoin.
• I understand that my pool never holds my coins between finding a block and me receiving it. If a block is found, the reward is paid straight to my own address, with nothing sitting as a balance anywhere.
• I've calculated my own realistic expected wait between blocks, using my actual hashrate against today's network hashrate, not a guess.

If you can't check most of these, that's the actual work to do before deciding anything about solo mining Dogecoin or Litecoin.

Do the Math on Your Own Numbers

Here's a worked example using today's figures, so you can see how the calculation runs with your own.

Say a single Scrypt rig puts out 9.5 gigahashes per second, an illustrative example, not a specific product claim. As the citation above shows, the Litecoin network hashrate backing Dogecoin through the merge sits at roughly 2.96 petahash per second, or 2,960,000 gigahashes per second, as of early October 2026.

9.5 divided by 2,960,000 gives a per-block probability of about 0.00000321, or roughly 1 in 311,600.

Litecoin targets a block every 2.5 minutes, which works out to about 210,240 blocks a year. Take the reciprocal of that per-block probability, 311,600 blocks, and divide by 210,240 blocks per year, and the expected wait for that rig comes out to roughly 1.5 years.

That's an average, not a schedule. Block finding is random: the actual wait for any one rig could be a week or three years longer than the average, and the network's difficulty sets those odds the same way at every pool, NexusPool included. A smaller difficulty shortens the expected wait. It does not make a find more likely to land on any particular day, and nothing here is a promise of a return on the electricity you spend.

Input	Value used in this example
Rig hashrate	9.5 GH/s (illustrative)
Litecoin/Dogecoin network hashrate	2.96 PH/s (CoinWarz, early Oct 2026)
Per-block probability	~1 in 311,600
Blocks per year (2.5 min target)	~210,240
Expected wait	~1.5 years

Where NexusPool Fits, If It Fits at All

If your checklist above left you still interested in solo mining Scrypt coins, the mechanics of where you point your rig matter. NexusPool supports solo mining on Litecoin and Dogecoin through the same merged-mining setup described above, alongside Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. The block pays your address. There is no balance for us to hold. 0% pool fee, and Payout Preflight shows the exact coinbase before you find a block.

Each hour, a signed receipt on the Glass Ledger for the work we counted. BIP340, against a key we publish. Check it on our home page or in your own code, including the details specific to Scrypt mining on NexusPool's Litecoin technology page.

None of this changes the arithmetic above. A 0% fee and a non-custodial payout don't shorten your expected wait; they just mean that whenever a block does land, you keep the whole thing instead of handing a slice to the pool first.

This post makes no claim about future Dogecoin or Litecoin prices, no promise that mining will become more profitable as rigs come back online or stay off, and no claim that any pool's software changes the odds difficulty already sets. If you solo mine, you are mining for yourself, on your own hardware, against odds that are identical at every pool on the same network.

The Check, In Short

If you checked more boxes than not, and the math above works out favorably with your real numbers, the current hashrate drop doesn't stop you from solo mining Dogecoin and Litecoin together. If you left most boxes unchecked, that's not a reason to quit, it's a reason to find your real numbers first and run the calculation again before you spend another kilowatt-hour.

Trust nothing. Verify your rig's hashrate against today's network number, not February's.