Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Hits All-Time High Eleven Months After the Halving
The hashrate has fully absorbed the reward cut. New ASIC deployments in West Texas and Ethiopia are pushing the network's compute toward a new equilibrium.
Bitcoin's mining difficulty adjusted upward by 3.8% on Wednesday, setting a new all-time high of 113.72 trillion. The adjustment — eleven months removed from the April 2024 halving — closes out a long period during which analysts debated whether the network's hashrate would ever fully recover from the 50% subsidy cut.
The new geography
New capacity is not coming online where it used to. MARA Holdings disclosed 420 MW of fresh deployment in West Texas last week. Bitfarms, Iris Energy, and several private operators have opened sites in Ethiopia, attracted by sub-3-cent hydro power and a government actively courting the industry. Kazakhstan, once the world's second-largest mining hub, is conspicuously absent from the growth numbers.
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