On-chain data shows that the year 2025 saw Bitcoin mining become significantly more difficult for miners, with difficulty seeing a net growth of 35%.
Bitcoin Difficulty Has Surpassed 148 Trillion Hashes
The year 2025 is coming to an end and it is a year where Bitcoin miners have significantly expanded their facilities. According to data from Blockchain.com, the Hashrate network, a measure of the total amount of computing power connected by miners, saw its 7-day average value increase from 795.7 terahashes per second (TH/s) at the start of the year to 1070.3 TH/s today.
How the BTC Hashrate changed in the past year | Source: Blockchain.com
During this growth phase, Hashrate set several new records, with the last all-time high (ATH) of 1,151.6 TH/s in October. Since then, the indicator has slowed, but even with the drop to the current level, it remains up about 34.5% since January 1.
Bitcoin miners’ revenue comes primarily from the block subsidy, which remains fixed in BTC value outside of halving events, so miners tend to depend on price growth to increase their revenue. This is why the Hashrate generally follows the price trend.
From the chart, it is visible that the Hashrate’s ATH came just after the cryptocurrency’s peak and the metric’s decline since then has also been accompanied by a decline in the price. Miners have been more resilient than the asset, however, as BTC is down year-to-date, while Hashrate is still up noticeably.
The growth of Bitcoin Hashrate always leads to an increase in another metric, called Difficulty. Difficulty is a feature built into the blockchain code, which controls how difficult it will be for miners to discover the next block on the network.
It automatically changes its value approximately every two weeks, based on miner performance since the last adjustment. Satoshi set a standard block time of 10 minutes for the network to follow; if miners take an average period faster than that to add blocks, the chain increases the difficulty.
The exact degree of the upward adjustment is always just enough to counteract the increase in miner velocity. In other words, this compensates for the increase in the Hashrate.
While miners were in a growth phase this year, Bitcoin had to increase its difficulty several times, thereby setting new ATHs.
The trend in the BTC Difficulty over the last twelve months | Source: Blockchain.com
Since setting a new record high above 155 trillion hashes in October, Bitcoin difficulty has also seen a decline. Despite this, the metric, at its current value of around 148.2, is still up 35% from the level of 109.8 trillion hashes from earlier this year.
The growth in difficulty has been quite similar to that of Hashrate, a natural consequence of the former reacting to the latter.
BTC Price
Bitcoin saw a recovery above $89,000 earlier, but it looks like the rally may not last as the asset is already back at $87,300.
Looks like the price of the coin has been consolidating in recent days | Source: BTCUSDT on TradingView
Featured image of Dall-E, Blockchain.com, chart from TradingView.com
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