Bitcoin’s hashrate, a measure of the computational power of the network, reached a record-high on January 6th, 2023, at block height 770,709. The network recorded a milestone of around 361.20 exahash per second (EH/s), a jump of more than 4% from the previous record of 347.16 EH/s recorded on November 12th, 2022.
Faster block intervals, the time between mined blocks, have been a result of the increased hashrate, falling between 8:51 and 7:31 minutes on average. The cost of producing Bitcoin has also dropped, with metrics from macromicro.me indicating that it is currently $16,568 per unit, while the spot price is $16,920 per unit. Some estimates put the average cost as low as $13,600 per unit.
The high hashrate is seen as a positive sign for the overall health of the Bitcoin network, but it could also lead to a significant increase in the difficulty of mining new blocks. The next difficulty adjustment is expected to take place on January 16th, with estimates ranging from a 7.04% increase to a potential record-setting 13.2% increase. The largest difficulty increase in 2022 was a 13.55% jump on October 10th.
Top mining pool Foundry USA currently holds 29.34% of the world’s total hashrate, or roughly 78.85 EH/s, followed by Antpool at 20.04%, F2pool at 16.74%, Viabtc at 9.71%, and Binance Pool at 7.85%.
