After severe turbulence in the Bitcoin mining industry last year, there seems to be a significant resurgence since the start of 2023.
While it has become even harder to mine BTC, miner revenue has also increased in a much-needed respite for such entities. Bitcoin’s network hash rate, which has been on a steady uptrend, has climbed to another record high of 342.16 EH/s.
- Foundry USA and Antpool have been dominating the hash rate with 33.9% and 18.7%, respectively.
- Closely following the hash rate is the mining difficulty also reached an all-time high – increasing by more than 2% – for the fourth consecutive time.
- Mining difficulty determines the computational power required to mine a block on the blockchain.
- According to Blockchain.com data, the latest push elevated the metric to 47.89 trillion at a block height of 784,224 on April 7th.
- Prior to this, the Bitcoin network witnessed a more substantial surge of nearly 8% on March 23. The previous two increases, on the other hand, were around 1.16% and 9.9%.
- In addition to increases in difficulty and hash rate, Bitcoin’s miner revenue has also reacted positively.
- Data revealed that the miners’ revenue had experienced nearly 70% growth since the beginning of the year.
- While miner revenue improved during the later stage of 2022, it wasn’t until March this year that the figure saw a substantial leg-up. In the past month alone, it was up by 27%.
- Bitcoin mining companies faced a rocky 2022 owing to declining prices that forced several of them to downsize operations or look for alternative sources of income. Some miners fought for survival, others had to shut shop, and some declared bankruptcy.
