Bitcoin Hashrate Hits Another Record Peak Amid Anemic Price Action

Bitcoin’s hashrate has reached a new all-time high of 248 EH/s, which essentially means that Bitcoin miners are computing 248 quintillion hashes per second.

After hitting the new peak, it then fell back to roughly 210 EH/s.

The cryptocurrency’s hashrate is typically calculated based on the speed of block production and the level of mining difficulty, but there are different approaches.

The metric is widely used for assessing the robustness of the Bitcoin network since it shows its total computational power. The higher the hashrate, the more difficult it is for bad actors to perform a 51% attack that would lead to double-spend issues.

The recent increase in hashrate means that more miners are joining the network. During severe market corrections, the hashrate typically drops as industry participants struggle to remain profitable and choose to capitulate. Case in point: December 2018. Last year, the Bitcoin hashrate also experienced a severe drop after China banned crypto mining and forced local industry participants to flee to friendlier jurisdictions.

Since it is virtually impossible to mine a Bitcoin block by oneself, miners have to join mining pools in order to get a piece of the block reward that typically stands at 6.25 BTC. According to data provided by BTC.com, Foundry USA, a mining pool operated by a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, accounts for more than a fifth of produced blocks over the past 24 hours.

While there is only a spurious correlation between the Bitcoin price and the hashrate, the growing strength of the network shows that miners are willing to invest more into infrastructure despite regulatory uncertainty surrounding energy-intensive proof-of-work mining.

Struggling to recover from macro headwinds, Bitcoin is currently trading at roughly $42,500 on major spot exchanges.