(Cointelegraph Team)
Data from on-chain monitoring resource BTC.com confirms that on Aug. 31, Bitcoin’s network difficulty hit new all-time highs.
Bitcoin seals biggest difficulty jum since start of 2022
Despite the recent BTC price drawdowns, Bitcoin’s network fundamentals are telling an optimistic tale as August comes to a close.
Both difficulty and hash rate are climbing, reflecting conviction among miners over long-term profitability of their network participation. It also suggests that the mining sector is absorbing lower profits versus costs in the short term.
Difficulty, which added 9.26% at its Aug. 31 automated readjustment, now stands at its highest ever. Competition among miners is as healthy as ever.
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For comparison, the last time that difficulty increased more at once was in January (9.32%), and before that, in August 2021 (13.24%).
According to BTC.com, hash rate now stands at an average 221 exahashes per second (EH/s), a hair off its highest-ever recorded average reading of 223 EH/s from just before May’s Terra LUNA implosion.
Bitcoin (BTC) fundamentals have delivered a “welcome uptick” which research says takes the edge off a classic bear market.
“Personally, I think as more hashrate comes from the US, we’ll see a new annual seasonal trend like we used to see in China. ie hot months lower hashrate/helping to stabilize grid, cool months higher hashrate,” macro analyst Jason Deane wrote in part of a Twitter response to the difficulty readjustment.
Bitcoin “barely hanging on”
The numbers provide a welcome counterpoint to troubled spot markets and gloomy projections for the rest of 2022.
With BTC/USD set to end August down almost 13%, on-chain analytics firm Glassnode said that a rebound in fundamentals would be a helpful antidote to an otherwise sour environment.
“It remains plausible that Bitcoin is in a bottom formation range and would be historically similar to all past bear markets,” it concluded in the latest edition of its regular newsletter, “The Week On-Chain,” released on Aug. 30 and titled “Bitcoin Barely Hanging On.”
However, Bitcoin prices are just barely hanging on, and any uptick in the fundamentals would be a welcome change.
BTC/USD circled $20,150 at the time of writing, having recovered from sub-$20,000 levels overnight, as per data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView.
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