As volatility sends BTC to new five-month highs, Bitcoin (BTC) is posting new records in network activity.
Data provided by MiningPoolStats confirms that Bitcoin’s hash rate hit new all-time highs today.
Hash rate exceeds the threshold of 300 EH/s
In another example of Bitcoin’s lightning recovery from the FTX crash, the network’s hash power is now higher than ever.
The hash rate, which expresses the processing power dedicated to the network by miners, currently stands at 321 hexahashes per second (EH/s), according to raw data from MiningPoolStats.
While this is only an estimate and impossible to measure entirely accurately, the latest readings are quite a feat, having never exceeded the 300 EH/s level before.
Even the mining company Brian confirm the values in its live reporting feed.
Other trackers BTC.com and Blockchain.com share slightly lower estimates, both around 275 EH/s. The latter shows that the hash rate reached an all-time high of 276.8 EH/s on January 20th.
“Your wealth has never been so safe!”reports the popular commentator BTC Archive on Twitter, confirming the improvement in sentiment.
The hash rate is a key indicator of Bitcoin’s security, and significant markdowns cause network difficulty to increase, enticing more miners to participate.
Network difficulty is also set to reach previously unseen levels this week, hinting at newfound competition in the mining industry.
According to data from BTC.com, the next automatic readjustment will increase the difficulty by 2.75% to 38.620 billion.
The previous readjustment reported a 10.26% increase, the highest since October 2022 and only the second double-digit increase since mid-2021.
Miners have the ability to make ends meet
Analyzing the current climate, CoinLupin, contributor to on-chain data platform CryptoQuant, warns that i miners are still selling their BTC reservesprobably to raise capital in the event of a market reversal.
Related: Lyn Alden: Bitcoin faces ‘considerable dangers’ from the Fed in 2023
“Now they have improved profitability for the first time in a while, and mining costs are lower than Bitcoin prices. Normally, one could proceed to mining and more holding, but it seems they view it more as a “opportunity to secure liquidity”he says in a blog post, describing “declining reserves at an accelerated rate”.
“One day there may be a price adjustment to the point where they get enough cash and start hoarding Bitcoin again. They are constantly reducing their Bitcoin holdings on the upside.”
CryptoQuant’s Miner Location Index, which measures BTC outflows to exchanges from miner wallets relative to their annual moving average, has seen multiple withdrawal peaks since Jan. 14.
Child 1,837,138 BTC, miner reserves are currently at their lowest since December 2021.
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