According to data from BTC.com, the difficulty of mining bitcoin increased by 9.3% on Wednesday, the largest increase since January and the second highest level ever.
According to the data, the mining difficulty reading as of block height 751,968 was 30.98 trillion.
The level of difficulty, which fluctuates every two weeks, peaked on May 11 at 31.25 trillion.
Bitcoin mining difficulty is a measurement of how difficult it would be for a miner to “dig out” Bitcoins by verifying the transactions in a block to add to the network.
Such changes in mining difficulty are closely tied to variations in mining hashrate, or the amount of processing power employed for mining.
According to data from Blockchain.com, on Tuesday, Bitcoin’s seven-day average hashrate was around 224.7 exahashes per second, up from a seven-day average of 197.7 exahashes on August 18 when the latest difficulty adjustment took place.
According to information from CoinMarketCap, Bitcoin was trading at US$20,254 at 3 p.m. on Wednesday in Hong Kong, down 0.7% over the previous 24 hours.
