Data shows that Foundry USA, the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pool, lost a significant portion of its Hashrate due to the US winter storm.
Foundry USA sees Bitcoin hash rate drop of 200 EH/s
The United States is currently experiencing an extreme weather event, with a powerful winter storm sweeping across much of the country. Arctic air accompanying the storm caused a sharp drop in temperatures, causing widespread disruption to transportation and power infrastructure.
Thousands of flights have been canceled across the country, while strain on the power grid has left more than 800,000 homes without access to electricity, according to a BBC report. Amidst all this chaos, the Bitcoin blockchain also suffered a major blow; The cryptocurrency’s Hashrate fell sharply as US miners reduced their energy consumption to ease pressure on the network.
One mining pool that was significantly impacted by the storm is Foundry USA. As of Friday, the pool had a total computing power of around 340 exahashes per second (EH/s), while on Monday that figure dropped to just 139 EH/s, according to data from MiningPoolStats.
The largest BTC mining pools in the world, ranked | Source: MiningPoolStats
Before the storm disruption, Foundry’s pool was by far the largest in the world, but after the Hashrate dropped by almost 60%, its power aligned with that of the second largest Antpool. Due to Foundry’s size, power reduction by its miners had a real effect on the network’s total hash rate, as data from CoinWarz shows.
The trend in the BTC mining Hashrate over the past month | Source: CoinWarz
Before the weekend, the Bitcoin Hashrate was floating around 1,118 EH/s, but on Sunday it fell to just 668 EH/s. The metric saw a rebound on Monday, but its latest value of 776 EH/s is still down more than 30%. The result? The blockchain processes each block in an average interval of 12.28 minutes, which is 2.28 minutes less than the expected rate of 10 minutes.
Even if the storm has damaged Bitcoin for the moment, it will not take long for the network to bounce back. Even in the event that Foundry USA downtime remains extended, BTC will correct the absence of US miners during the next difficulty adjustment. Satoshi Nakamoto programmed BTC so that the network always targets a block time of 10 minutes. If miners deviate from this rate, the network adjusts a metric known as “Difficulty” just enough to get miners back to the desired speed.
Given the magnitude of the latest Hashrate drop, lasting disruption would mean the Bitcoin blockchain would be forced to significantly ease its woes. Currently, it is estimated that the next network adjustment will reduce the difficulty by 18%.
BTC Price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $87,700, down 5.7% over the past week.
Looks like the price of the coin has plunged over the last few days | Source: BTCUSDT on TradingView
Featured image of Dall-E, chart from TradingView.com
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