While the price of bitcoin may have consolidated around the $50K threshold, the hashrate of the network has reached an all-time high (ATH), which it achieved on December 8^th, 2021. The processing power of bitcoin miners has increased a great deal, even though mining bitcoin has become harder about 8.33% since December 11^th. 2021 has seen the price of bitcoin reach a record-breaking high as opposed to previous years.

Likewise, the network’s hashrate has also experienced record highs this year on two occasions, as there has been an exponential increase in the SHA256 hash power. In mid-April, Bitcoin’s ATH price had reached a whopping $64,000, whereas Bitcoin’s hashrate had reached an all-time high on May 9^th of about 191.42 exahash per second (EH/s).

On November 10^th, Bitcoin’s prices had reached another all-time high, as the pioneer cryptocurrency reached the $69,000 mark. Since then, Bitcoin’s price has come down about 26%, but its hashrate appears to have skyrocketed.

On December 8^th, the hashrate reached another all-time high of 194.95 EH/s, which is the highest in its lifetime. There have been significant changes since the last ATH was reached back on May 9^th. That’s when Bitcoin had seen its biggest drop in mining difficulty of about 27.94%.

There had been a further drop of 4.81%, but since then, the difficulty level has increased nine times consecutively. In the last four weeks, there has been a 1.49% decrease in bitcoin’s mining difficulty, but on December 11^th, it saw an increase of 8.33%. This means that mining bitcoin is as difficult as it was back on May 13^th and the difficulty parameter stands at 25 trillion.

After the epoch change on December 11^th, the difficulty is 24.1 trillion, which is just a tad lower than the all-time high of the difficulty. Since May 9^th, there has also been another change, which can be seen in the hashrate distribution of the top mining pools.

Antpool is the top mining pool today, which is contributing about 19.39% of the global hashrate, which is about 34.6 EH/s. F2pool is the second-largest BTC mining pool, which has a hashrate of 25.27 EH/s or about 14.16% of the global hashrate.

In recent months, the top new contender has been Foundry USA, which claimed the third spot on December 12^th, 2021 by contributing 23.32 EH/s or 13.07% of the global hashrate. It has benefitted from the clampdown on crypto mining in China. In the last quarter of 2021, stealth miners or unknown hashrate miners have also made a significant contribution in the global hash power.

This unknown hashrate is the fifth-largest mining entity, as it contributes 21.77 EH/s or 12.20% of the global hashrate. The first two quarters of the year, along with the last quarter of 2020, saw a greater number of orders of mining rigs from enterprise mining operations.

A number of these have expected delivery of the cutting-edge bitcoin mining devices by the end of this year, or early in 2022. Tens of thousands of top-of-the-line mining rigs have been ordered and it is possible that a fraction of these machines are contributing to the higher global hashrate.