Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Will Jump This Sunday, Data Shows

The BTC network is set to increase the Difficulty in the next adjustment. The “Difficulty” here refers to a metric built into the Bitcoin blockchain that controls how hard the miners would find it to mine a block.

Fresh on-chain data indicates that the Bitcoin Difficulty is set to increase by about 4% in the upcoming adjustment, driven by a surge in the Hashrate.

Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Set To Jump On Sunday

As per data from CoinWarz, the BTC network is set to increase the Difficulty in the next adjustment. ‘Difficulty’ here refers to a metric built into the Bitcoin blockchain that governs how challenging the miners will find it to mine a block. This feature exists to regulate how long the miners take to find the next block.

Every time the miners mine a block, they harvest a reward associated with it, known as the block subsidy. This reward serves as the only possible way to generate more of the asset, so by controlling the rate at which the miners can receive it, the inflation of the cryptocurrency can be controlled.

As is common knowledge, miners on the Bitcoin network use computing power to perform their task of mining. This total computing power held by the validators is known as the “Hashrate.”

Whenever the miners increase the Hashrate, they become faster at their task and churn out blocks at a faster rate. As explained before, the network doesn’t want this to happen, so what it does is that it increases the Difficulty just enough that the miners would be back to the standard network pace, which is a block every 10 minutes.

Similarly, if the miners decrease the Hashrate, the chain responds by lowering the Difficulty. All these changes pertaining to the metric occur roughly every two weeks during automatic network adjustments.

Here’s some relevant data regarding how the blockchain is faring heading into the next such adjustment, which is set to take place this Sunday.

As can be seen, the average block time since the last Difficulty adjustment has been 9.60 minutes, which is notably lower than the 10 minutes that the network aims for. Hence, to slow down the validators, the chain will increase the Difficulty by over 4%.

The reason behind the low block time lies in the surge that the Hashrate has seen, as shown by the chart for the 7-day average value of the metric from Blockchain.com.

7-Day Avg Bitcoin Hashrate Sets New ATH, BTC Difficulty To Follow?

From the graph, it’s apparent that the 7-day average Bitcoin Hashrate set a new all-time high (ATH) just a couple of days ago. The indicator has since seen some pullback, but its value is still quite close to this record. If the Difficulty does go up by 4% as it’s looking right now, it would also set a new ATH.

BTC Price

At the moment, Bitcoin’s price is around $97,000, down more than 6% over the last week.