The hashpower behind the Bitcoin network has continued to stay above the 180 exahash per second (EH/s) zone after recently reaching a lifetime high. Five months ago the hashrate tapped a low at 69 EH/s and since then, the hashpower has increased by 163% during the last 178 days, or five months ago.
Bitcoin Hashrate continues to be hot at the end of the year after China’s crackdown on Bitcoin mining last summer
Miners dedicating SHA256 hash power to the Bitcoin blockchain have maintained processing power above 180 EH / s. At the time of writing on December 23, the BTC hashrate was hovering just above the 186 EH / s area. Recent hashrate highs track BTC’s lifetime hash rate, reaching 194.95 EH / s on December 8, 2021. Since then, measurements indicate that the hashrate has hovered below this region and 30-day statistics show a few times that it quickly approached the December 8 high.
BTC’s hashrate is currently doing a whole lot better than records show on June 28, 2021, when the processing power plummeted to 69 EH/s. Thanks to the crackdowns on Chinese mining operations located in China, the network lost 63.87% of its hashpower from 191 EH/s on May 9, to the 69 EH/s at the end of June. Five months later, the hashrate has rebounded and regained the processing power lost during that time frame. At the end of June, BTC’s price was much lower, swapping for $34K per unit.
Difficulty should drop slightly, Foundry USA is in first place this week
Last week, BTC traded at prices between $ 46.5,000 and $ 49.5,000, which kept the hash rate high, even after the network’s mining difficulty increased by 8.33 % on December 11. In fact, Network Difficulty may see a downward adjustment for the first time since the 1.49% drop on November 28. As of this writing, and in more than 24 hours, the difficulty should drop by a hair’s breadth, down 0.23%. This would reduce the current mining difficulty one step further from 24.20 trillion to 24.14 trillion.
Currently, the largest bitcoin (BTC) miner in terms of overall hashrate is Foundry USA with 17.17% of the global hashpower or 29.82 EH/s. The second-largest miner today is Bitmain’s Antpool with 14.78% of the global hashpower or 25.67 EH/s. Antpool is followed by Viabtc (14.57%), F2pool (13.26%), and Binance Pool (12.17%). Unknown hashrate or stealth miners command 12.17% of the network’s hashpower and are the sixth-largest entity in terms of global hashrate. The unknown hashrate at the time of writing has around 21.14 exahash per second of hashpower.
