The mining difficulty of the Bitcoin network, a metric that tracks the relative challenge of adding new blocks to Bitcoin (BTC) ledger, fell about 11.16% in the past 24 hours, the worst drop in a single adjustment period since China’s 2021 ban on crypto mining.
Bitcoin mining difficulty is 125.86T and took effect at block 935,429, data from CoinWarz watch. THE average blocking time lasts more than 11 minutes, thus exceeding the goal of 10 minutes.
According to CoinWarz, the difficulty is expected to decrease again at the next adjustment on February 23 by around 10.4% to 112.7T.
China announced a ban on cryptocurrency mining and began imposing a crackdown on digital assets in May 2021, resulting in several downward difficulty adjustments between May and July 2021, ranging from 12.6% to 27.9%, according to historical data from CoinWarz.
This sudden downward adjustment occurred in a context widespread slowdown in the crypto marketwhich caused the price of Bitcoin to fall by more than 50% compared to the an all-time high of over $125,000 to one minimum of $60,000and a winter storm in the United States that caused a temporary shutdown of miners.
Related: Exodus of Bitcoin miners could push BTC price below $60,000
Winter Storm Fern sweeps across the US, reducing miners’ hashrate
A severe winter storm swept the United States in January, affecting 34 states across 2,000 square miles with snow, ice and freezing temperatures that disrupted power infrastructure.
The power grid disruption caused U.S.-based Bitcoin miners to temporarily reduce their power consumption and halt operations, thereby reducing the network’s total hashrate, the amount of computing power spent by miners to secure the Bitcoin protocol.
Foundry USA, a US-based mining pool and the largest mining pool by hashrate in the world, briefly lost around 60% of its hashing power in the middle of winter storm Fern.
The mining pool’s total hashing power increased from nearly 400 exahashes per second (EH/s) to around 198 EH/s in response to the storm.
Foundry USA’s hashrate has returned to over 354 EH/s, the mining pool’s hashing power at the time of writing, and it still holds 29.47% market share, according to to the hash index.
However, the total hashrate of the Bitcoin network fell to its lowest level in four months in January, amid deteriorating crypto market conditions and the migration of miners to AI data centers and other forms of high-performance computing.
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