Bitcoin mining complexity has updated its historical high despite the crypto market downturn

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty BTC $66,703.38 Mezo Wrapped BTC 1.99% Market capitalization $37.79 million VOL. 24 hours $1.06 billion has risen to 144.4 trillion, a 15% increase — the largest percentage jump since 2021, when the network underwent a dramatic restructuring after China’s mining ban. The difficulty score determines how difficult it is to mine a new block on the network and is adjusted every two weeks or so to ensure that blocks continue to appear every 10 minutes regardless of changes in the hashrate.

The latest increase comes after a previous 12% decline caused by a drop in the hashrate due to a winter storm in the United States that forced several major operators to cut back on operations. In the fall, when the price of bitcoin reached an all-time high of about $ 126,500, the hashrate increased to 1.1 zetahashes per second. In February, it dropped to 826 exahash, but has now recovered to 1 zetahex, while the price of BTC has returned to around $ 67 thousand.

Despite the recovery of the hashrate, mining profitability remains under pressure. Hashprice, which is the estimated daily income of miners per unit of hashrate, is at multi-year lows of about $ 23.9 per petache. This complicates the work of less capitalized companies, while large operators with access to cheap energy continue to mine actively.

Some countries are showing significant results even in such conditions. For example, the United Arab Emirates has about $ 344 million in unrealized mining profits. It is the large players with efficient infrastructure that maintain a high level of hashrate even when the price of bitcoin remains below its peak.

At the same time, some public mining companies have begun to reorient their resources to artificial intelligence and high-performance computing centers. Bitfarms has announced a rebranding and a shift in focus to AI infrastructure, and investors are urging Riot Platforms to expand its activities in this area. This may become a new factor affecting the balance between bitcoin mining and the development of related technologies.